These, my father, were the first words I heard Chaka speak, and they
were words of prophecy, and they came true. The last words I heard him
speak were words of prophecy also, and I think that they will come
true. Even now they are coming true. In the one he told how the Zulu
people should rise. And say, have they not risen? In the other he
told how they should fall; and they did fall. Do not the white men
gather themselves together even now against U'Cetywayo, as vultures
gather round a dying ox? The Zulus are not what they were to stand
against them. Yes, yes, they will come true, and mine is the song of a
people that is doomed.
But of these other words I will speak in their place.
I went to my mother. Presently she raised herself from the ground and
sat up with her hands over her face. The blood from the wound the
stick had made ran down her face on to her breast, and I wiped it away
with grass. She sat for a long while thus, while the child cried, the
cow lowed to be milked, and I wiped up the blood with the grass. At
last she took her hands away and spoke to me.
"Mopo, my son," she said, "I have dreamed a dream. I dreamed that I
saw the boy Chaka who struck me: he was grown like a giant. He stalked
across the mountains and the veldt, his eyes blazed like the
lightning, and in his hand he shook a little assegai that was red with
blood.
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