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

Listen ! Some
RED SUNSETS 293
But what about those three women who escaped ?
weeks elapse ; then out through one of
the limestone chinks you can hear a gentle moan— ^tell-
tale moan of a human being. There it is again, and this
time, out through the same chink, comes a wail of the
moribund :
*' We are all dead. Oh, let me out !
" She is
a woman moaning, none other than Nanga, who used to
live over at Munema village. Outside the bully warriors
are shaking with fear at this voice from the tomb. Then
they summon up courage to challenge her that she is
lying, and that she has only returned from the dead to
be their undoing. But the answer they get is her
sepulchral offer that if they will only disentomb her,
she will gladly permit her two hands and feet to be cut
off, if she is found to have lied to them : " ye out
in the sunlight, sitting down to the banquet of life, let
me out from this Lake of Fire." So at long last here
she comes, extricated from the cruel debris to the light
of day—she and two poor half-dead mortals. Yes, they
bring a gruesome tale from that " land of the dead," a
tale of slow, lingering emaciation and dissolution. First
the food failed, then the faggots, and then came the
exasperated expedients for firewood—all the old gun-
stocks and spear-shafts burned off first. Then— good-
night !—the great gleaming tusks of ivory. This tomb-
cave, be it noted, was also the chiefs treasure-trove, and
there lay the accumulated ivory of years. Thus he died
in his glory, heated at a funeral blaze of burning ivory,
" Emperor's Fuel," they call it. It beggars all description.