Kneeling on their knees, the maidens presented her with food--meat
and curdled milk, and roasted cobs of corn. She ate of the corn and the
milk, but the meat she sent away as a gift to the captains. Then alone in
that kraal, in which after they had served her even the girls seemed to
fear to stay, Rachel slept as best she might in such solitude, while
without the fence two thousand armed savages watched over her safety.
It was a troubled sleep, for she dreamed always of that dreadful-looking
Isanuzi with the fish-bladders in her hair, yelling to her that her path
through life was watered with blood, and bidding her go back to her own
kraal and see whether the words were true, an ominous saying of which she
could not read the riddle. She dreamed also of the woman's coarse, furious
face turned suddenly to one of abject terror, and then of the dreadful end
the red death without mercy and without appeal which she had let loose by
a motion of her hand. Another dream she had was of her father and her
mother, who seemed to be lying side by side staring towards her with
wide-open eyes, and that when she spoke to them they would not answer.
So the long night wore away, till at length Rachel woke with a start
thinking that a hand had been laid upon her face, to see by the faint
light of dawn which struggled into the hut through the cracks of the
door-boards that the hand was only a great rat that had crawled over her
and now nibbled at her hair.
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