The Book of Missionary Heroes - Basil Mathews (reading a book txt) 📗
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The two men strode on. The forest path opened out to a broad clearing. They were in an African village. But no voice was heard and no step broke the horrible silence. It was a village of death. The sun blazed on the charred heaps which now marked the sites of happy African homes; the gardens were desolate and utterly destroyed. The village was wiped out. Those who had submitted were far away, trudging through the forest, under the lash of the slaver; those who had been too old to walk or too brave to be taken without fight were slain.
The heart of Livingstone burned with one great resolve—he would track this foul thing into the very heart of Africa and then blazon its horrors to the whole world.
The two men trudged back to the river bank again. Now, with their brown companions, they took the shallow boat that they had brought on the deck of the Asthmatic, and headed still farther up the Shiré river from the Zambesi toward the unknown Highlands of Central Africa.
Facing Spears and Arrows
Only the sing-song chant of the Africans as they swung their paddles, and the frightened shriek of a glittering parrot, broke the stillness as the boat pushed northward against the river current.
The paddles flashed again, and as the boat came round a curve in the river they were faced by a sight that made every man sit, paddle in hand, motionless with horror. The bank facing them in the next curve of the river was black with men. The ranks of savages bristled with spears and arrows. A chief yelled to them to turn back. Then a cloud of arrows flew over the boat.
"Go on," said Livingstone quietly to the Africans. Their paddles took the water and the boat leapt toward the savage semi-circle on the bank. The water was shallower now. Before any one realised what was happening Livingstone had swung over the edge of the boat and, up to his waist in water, was wading ashore with his arms above his head.
"It is peace!" he called out, and waded on toward the barbs of a hundred arrows and spears. The men in the boat sat breathless, waiting to see their leader fall with a score of spears through his body. But the savages on the bank were transfixed with amazement at Livingstone's sheer audacity. Awed by something god-like in this unflinching and unarmed courage, no finger let fly a single arrow.
"You think," he called to the chief, "that I am a slave-raider." For Livingstone knew that he had never in all his wanderings been attacked by Africans save where they had first been infuriated by the cruel raiders.
The chief scowled.
"See," cried Livingstone, baring his arm to show his white skin as he again and again had done when threatened by Africans, "is this the colour of the men who come to make slaves and to kill?"
The savages gazed with astonishment. They had never before seen so white a skin.
"No," Livingstone went on, "this is the skin of the tribe that has heart toward the African."
Almost unconsciously the man had dropped the spear points and arrow heads as he was speaking. The chief listened while Livingstone, who was now on the bank, told the savages how he had come across the great waters from a far-off land with a message of peace and goodwill.
Unarmed and with a dauntless heroism the "white man who would go on" had won a great victory over that tribe. He now passed on in his boat up the river and over rapids toward the wonderful shining Highlands in the heart of Africa.
"Deliverance to the Captives"
Dr. Kirk was recalled to England by the British Government; but Livingstone trudged on in increasing loneliness over mountains and across rivers and lakes, plunging through marshes, racked a score of times with fever, robbed of his medicines, threatened again and again by the guns of the slave-raiding Arabs and the spears and clubs of savage head-hunters, bearing on his bent shoulders the Cross of the negroes' agony—slavery, till at last, alone and on his knees in the dead of night, our Greatheart crossed his last River, into the presence of his Father in heaven.
Yet still, though his body was dead, his spirit would go on. For the life Livingstone lived, the death he died, and the record he wrote of the slave-raiders' horrible cruelties thrilled all Britain to heal that "open sore of the world." Queen Victoria made Dr. Kirk her consul at Zanzibar, and told him to make the Sultan of Zanzibar order all slave-trading through that great market to cease. And to-day, because of David Livingstone, through all the thousands of miles of Africa over which he trod, no man dare lay the shackles of slavery on another. To-day, where Livingstone saw the slave-market in Zanzibar, a grand church stands, built by negro hands, and in that cathedral you may hear the negro clergy reading such words as—
Prepare ye the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight,"
and African boys singing in their own tongue words that sum up the whole life of David Livingstone.
To preach deliverance to the captives."
[44] Dr Kirk, now Sir John Kirk, G.C.M.G., who, leaning upon his African ebony stick and gazing with his now dimmed eyes into the glow of the fire, told me many stories of his adventures with Livingstone on his Zambesi journeyings, including this one. See next chapter.
[45] A friend of mine asked a very old African in Matabeleland whether—as a boy—he remembered Dr. Livingstone. "Oh, yes," replied the aged Matabele, "he came into our village out of the bush walking thus," and the old man got up and stumped along, imitating the determined tread of Livingstone, which, after sixty years, was the one thing he remembered.
CHAPTER XVI THE BLACK PRINCE OF AFRICAKhama
(Dates 1850—the present day)
One day men came running into a village in South Africa to say that a strange man, whose body was covered with clothes and whose face was not black, was walking toward their homes. He was coming from the South.
Never before had such a man been seen in their tribe. So there was great excitement and a mighty chattering went through the round wattle of mud huts with their circular thatched roofs.
The African Chief, Sekhome—who was the head of this Bamangwato tribe and who was also a noted witch-doctor—started out along the southward trail to meet the white man. By his side ran his eldest son. He was a lithe, blithe boy; his chocolate coloured skin shone and the muscles rippled as he trotted along. He was so swift that his name was the name of the antelope that gallops across the veldt. Cama is what the Bamangwato call the antelope. Khama is how we spell the boy's name.
He gazed in wonder as he saw a sturdy man wearing clothes such as he had not seen before—what we call coat and hat, trousers and boots. He looked into the bronzed face of the white man and saw that his eyes and mouth were kind. Together they walked back into the village. Chief Sekhome found that the white man's name was David Livingstone; and that he was a kind doctor who could make boys and men better when they were ill, with medicines out of a black japanned box.
When evening came the boy Khama saw the strange white man open another box and take out a curious thing which seemed to open yet was full of hundreds and hundreds of leaves. Khama had never seen such a thing in his life and he could not understand why Livingstone opened it and kept looking at it for a long time, for he had never seen a book before and did not even know what letters were or what reading was.
It seemed wonderful to him when he heard that that book could speak to Livingstone without making any sound and that it told him about the One Infinite, Holy, Loving God, Who is Father of all men, black or brown or white, and Whose Son, Jesus Christ, came to teach us all to love God and to love one another. For the book was the Bible which Livingstone all through his heroic exploring of Africa read each day.
So Livingstone passed on from the village; but this boy Khama never forgot him, and in time—as we shall see—other white men came and taught Khama himself to read that same book and worship that same God.
The Fight with the Lion
Meanwhile strange adventures came to the growing young Khama. This is the story of some of them:
The leaping flames of a hunting camp-fire threw upon the dark background of thorn trees weird shadows of the men who squatted in a circle on the ground, talking.
The men were all Africans, the picked hunters from the tribe of the Bamangwato. They were out on the spoor of a great lion that had made himself the terror of the tribe. Night after night the lion had leapt among their oxen and had slain the choicest in the chief's herds. Again and again the hunters had gone out on the trail of the ferocious beast; but always they returned empty-handed, though boasting loudly of what they would do when they should face the lion.
"To-morrow, yes, to-morrow," cried a young Bamangwato hunter rolling his eyes, "I will slay tau e bogale—the fierce lion."
The voices of the men rose on the night air as the whole group declared that the beast should ravage their herds no more—the whole group, except one. This young man's tense face and the keen eyes that glowed in the firelight showed his contempt for those who swaggered so much and did so little. He was Khama, the son of Sekhome, the chief. The wild flames gleamed on him as he stood there, full six feet of tireless manhood leaning on his gun, like a superb statue carved in ebony. Those swift, spare limbs of his, that could keep pace with a galloping horse, gave him the right to his name, Khama—the Antelope.
The voices dropped, and the men, rolling themselves in the skins of wild beasts, lay down and slept—all except one, whose eyes watched in the darkness as sleeplessly as the stars. When they were asleep Khama took up his gun and went out into the starry night.
The night passed. As the first flush of dawn paled the stars, and the men around the cold ashes of the fire sat up, they gazed in awed amazement. For they saw, striding toward them, their tall young chieftain; and over his shoulders hung the tawny skin and mane of a full-grown king lion. Alone in the night he had slain the terror of the tribe!
The men who had boasted of what they meant to do and had never performed, never heard Khama—either at that time or later—make any mention of this great feat.
It was no wonder that the great Bamangwato tribe looked at the tall, silent, resolute young chieftain and, comparing him with his crafty father Sekhome and his treacherous, cowardly younger brother Khamane, said, "Khama is our boikanyo—our confidence."
The Fight with the Witch-doctors
The years went by; and that fierce old villain Sekhome plotted and laid ambush against the life of his valiant son, Khama. Men who followed David Livingstone into Africa had come as missionaries to his tribe and had taught him the story of Jesus and given him the knowledge of reading and writing. So Khama had become a Christian, though Sekhome his father was still a heathen witch-doctor. Khama would have
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