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

292 THINKING BLACK
which they all died was a limestone cave, and so utterly
did they disappear from mortal ken that natives will be
wary of all such subterranean holes in future. Briefly, it
came fearfully and finally to this. When this chief made
his last stand, he retreated back on this huge cave,
resolved to die grandly, impressively, and magnificently
—die with all his people round him like a winding-sheet
a common cave-coffin for the lot. Long ago he had made
his dispositions for such a startling " sunset " ; so with a rush,
and under cover of night, the whole town stampeded into
the trap, a cave seductively large, provisions in abundance,
and firewood. But alas ! unlike many of its spacious
sister-caves with as many tunnels as a burrow, this was
only a long deceptive ** blind-alley "—blind the cave, and
doubly blind the hunted-down negroes who entered it.
For with a salvo of applause the enemy now rushes up
to the cave's mouth and seals the entombed doom of
all that horde of foolish fugitives. There is no shriek,
meanwhile, from these runaways. Oh no, only the
beginning of the long, lingering end. With a refinement
of cruelty, the enemy now sits down at the cave mouth
and starts to "plug the leak," a process this involving
the blocking of the cave's mouth with rocks ; then, over
the rocks, a banking of earth—thus pathetically and
literally making it a colossal tomb with the old orthodox
mound of earth on the top. And so autumn wanes.
The long days pass, days in which, with sinister signifi-
cance, the great blue-bottle flies hum in and out of the
chinks of the rocks to tell the tale of corruption.