Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

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THINKING BLACK
let the welkin ring, for he is justified. He who, per
contra, finds himself covered with charcoal must himself
die the death by fire and become charcoal. With all this
rival-religion idea of theirs, how hard it is to persuade
such a superstitious people that the best way to see Divine
Light is to put out their own farthing candle ! Yet these
negroes laugh when you tell them of the prisoner into
whose cell the light came through a little crack in the
wall. And one day, when they came to destroy the wall,
he bitterly lamented because it would destroy the crack
through which his daylight came. Our message rings
out one note, and one only : " See thy Sin, but behold
thy Saviour."
One rarely seen old man has a great say here
Kavoto, they call him, a weird old magic-magnate who
has made the whole land hum with his dark doings among
the lions. But how can we distinguish the bones of fact
from the drapery of invention? The cum grano story
runs that from far and near he summons his lions to
receive their fetish orders ; no doors locked in his forest
hamlet, and they trot in and out like friendly mastiff's.
At sundown, he sends out this " lion-call," a rumbling roar
simulating their cry, and in they bowl to supper. Then
it is they are commissioned N., S., K, and W. to raid
villages and pick ofi* the various victims of his hate,
" orders " being received at this Lion Depot and carefully
executed. That is to say, A. deposits a sum in Kavoto's
hand for the murdering of B. by lions, and the specialist
guarantees results. The old map-makers were right