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

364 THINKING BLACK
who in many things is far and near belauded as a Chief
with a delicate and scrupulous sense of honour, and
certainly Mushidi showed his usual shrewdness when he
gave this man long ago a kind of governorship (Diyanga)
of the Luapula Valley.
But these bellicose blacks have hearts of adamant
where God's Gospel is concerned, and only met my appeal
with mortified glances. Every man of them said in his
heart—and a horrible saying it is—that God was a fool
to leave His Son to die. In Luba the very phrase "a
fool's death "is rendered "a sheep's death" (Isa. liii. 7).
Chilolo's son, a young exquisite, was as solemn as a
sermon when he said that no black man would believe in
such a God. And here was I, all alone in that hot den,
with lacerated feelings and blistered feet—ah, how a
Missionary suddenly shrivels up into himself with one
whifi" of such loneliness. But I cannot go back, so I must
go forward—and what a goal, the linking up with our own
English race from East ! Any
day something thrilling
may happen, for coincidently with our moving in from the
Western Atlantic are they not also boring up here into
the Interior from the Indian Ocean ? The exact picture
of this exciting thing is to be found in thinking of us as
engaged in the excavation of a tunnel, and here we have
at least reached the delirious point where we almost
begin to hear the pickaxes of the excavators at work in the
other side of the tunnel ! Of course the plan of route
ahead is not even optional now. It seems it has fallen to
my lot, and I hope to my delight, as well as my duty, to