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TITLE: THE GHOST KINGS
AUTHOR: H. RIDER HAGGARD
EBOOK: E05708 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

 THE GHOST KINGS

      By

H. Rider Haggard

First published _July_ 1908. _Reprinted March_ 1909.

Cheap Edition _December_ 1911.

 CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. THE GIRL

2. THE BOY

3. GOOD-BYE

4. ISHMAEL

5. NOIE

6. THE CASTING OF THE LOTS

7. THE MESSAGE OF THE KING

8. MR. DOVE VISITS ISHMAEL

9. THE TAKING OF NOIE

10. THE OMEN OF THE STAR

11. ISHMAEL VISITS THE Inkosazana

12. RACHEL SEES A VISION

13. RICHARD COMES

14. WHAT CHANCED AT RAMAH

15. RACHEL COMES HOME

16. THE THREE DAYS

17. RACHEL LOSES HER SPIRIT

18. THE CURSE OF THE Inkosazana

19. RACHEL FINDS HER SPIRIT

20. THE MOTHER OF THE TREES

21. THE CITY OF THE DEAD

22. IN THE SANCTUARY

23. THE DREAM IN THE NORTH

24. THE END AND THE BEGINNING

EXTRACT

FROM LETTER HEADED "THE KING'S KRAAL, ZULULAND, 12TH MAY, 1855."

_"The Zulus about here have a strange story of a white girl who in
Dingaan's day was supposed to 'hold the spirit' of some legendary goddess
of theirs who is also white. This girl, they say, was very beautiful and
brave, and had great power in the land before the battle of the Blood
River, which they fought with the emigrant Boers. Her title was Lady of
the Zulus, or more shortly, Zoola, which means Heaven.

"She seems to have been the daughter of a wandering, pioneer missionary,
but the king, I mean Dingaan, murdered her parents, of whom he was
jealous, after which she went mad and cursed the nation, and it is to this
curse that they still attribute the death of Dingaan, and their defeats
and other misfortunes of that time.

"Ultimately, it appears, in order to be rid of this girl and her evil eye,
they sold her to the doctors of a dwarf people, who lived far away in a
forest and worshipped trees, since when nothing more has been heard of
her. But according to them the curse stopped behind.

"If I can find out anything more of this curious story I will let you
know, but I doubt if I shall be able to do so. Although fifteen years or
so have passed since Dingaan's death in 1840 the Kaffirs are very shy of
talking about this poor lady, and, I think, only did so to me because I am
neither an official nor a missionary, but one whom they look upon as a
friend because I have doctored so many of them. When I asked the Indunas
about her at first they pretended total ignorance, but on my pressing the
question, one of them said that 'all that tale was unlucky and "went
beyond" with Mopo.' Now Mopo, as I think I wrote to you, was the man who
stabbed King Chaka, Dingaan's brother. He is supposed to have been mixed
up in the death of Dingaan also, and to be dead himself. At any rate he
vanished away after Panda came to the throne."_

CHAPTER I

THE GIRL

The afternoon was intensely, terribly hot. Looked at from the high ground
where they were encamped above the river, the sea, a mile or two to her
right--for this was the coast of Pondo-land--to little Rachel Dove staring
at it with sad eyes, seemed an illimitable sheet of stagnant oil. Yet
there was no sun, for a grey haze hung like a veil beneath the arch of the
sky, so dense and thick that its rays were cut off from the earth which
lay below silent and stifled. Tom, the Kaffir driver, had told her that a
storm was coming, a father of storms, which would end the great drought.
Therefore he had gone to a kloof in the mountains where the oxen were in
charge of the other two native boys--since on this upland there was no
pasturage to drive them back to the waggon. For, as he explained to her,
in such tempests cattle are apt to take fright and rush away for miles,
and without cattle their plight would be even worse than it was at
present.

At least this was what Tom said, but Rachel, who had been brought up among
natives and understood their mind, knew that his real reason was that he
wished to be out of the way when the baby was buried. Kaffirs do not like
death, unless it comes by the assegai in war, and Tom, a good creature,
had been fond of that baby during its short little life. Well, it was
buried now; he had finished digging its resting-place in the hard soil
before he went. Rachel, poor child, for she was but fifteen, had borne it
to its last bed, and her father had unpacked his surplice from a box, put
it on and read the Burial Service over the grave. Afterwards together they
had filled in that dry, red earth, and rolled stones on to it, and as
there were few flowers at this season of the year, placed a shrivelled
branch or two of mimosa upon the stones--the best offering they had to
make.

Rachel and her father were the sole mourners at this funeral, if we may
omit two rock rabbits that sat upon a shelf of stone in a neighbouring
cliff, and an old baboon which peered at these strange proceedings from
its crest, and finally pushed down a boulder before it departed, barking
indignantly. Her mother could not come because she was ill with grief and
fever in a little tent by the waggon. When it was all over they returned
to her, and there had been a painful scene.

Mrs. Dove was lying on a bed made of the cartel, or frame strung with
strips of green hide, which had been removed from the waggon, a pretty,
pale-faced woman with a profusion of fair hair. Rachel always remembered
that scene. The hot tent with its flaps turned up to let in whatever air
there might be. Her mother in a blue dressing-gown, dingy with wear and
travel, from which one of the ribbon bows hung by a thread, her face
turned to the canvas and weeping silently. The gaunt form of her father
with his fanatical, saint-like face, pale beneath its tan, his high
forehead over which fell one grizzled lock, his thin, set lips and
far-away grey eyes, taking off his surplice and folding it up with quick
movements of his nervous hands, and herself, a scared, wondering child,
watching them both and longing to slip away to indulge her grief in
solitude. It seemed an age before that surplice was folded, pushed into a
linen bag which in their old home used to hold dirty clothes, and finally
stowed away in a deal box with a broken hinge. At length it was done, and
her father straightened himself with a sigh, and said in a voice that
tried to be cheerful:

"Do not weep, Janey. Remember this is all for the best. The Lord hath
taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord."

Her mother sat up looking at him reproachfully with her blue eyes, and
answered in her soft Scotch accent:

"You said that to me before, John, when the other one went, down at
Grahamstown, and I am tired of hearing it. Don't ask me to bless the Lord
when He takes my babes, no, nor any mother, He Who could spare them if He
chose. Why should the Lord give me fever so that I could not nurse it, and
make a snake bite the cow so that it died? If the Lord's ways are such,
then those of the savages are more merciful."

"Janey, Janey, do not blaspheme," her father had exclaimed. "You should
rejoice that the child is in Heaven."

"Then do you rejoice and leave me to grieve. From to-day I only make one
prayer, that I may never have another. John," she added with a sudden
outburst, "it is your fault. You know well I told you how it would be. I
told you that if you would come this mad journey the babe would die, aye,
and I tell you"--here her voice sank to a kind of wailing whisper--"before
the tale is ended others will die too, all of us, except Rachel there, who
was born to live her life. Well, for my part, the sooner the better, for I
wish to go to sleep with my children."

"This is evil," broke in her husband, "evil and rebellious--"

"Then evil and rebellious let it be, John. But why am I evil if I have the
second sight like my mother before me? Oh! she warned me what must come if
I married you, and I would not listen; now I warn you, and you will not
listen. Well, so be it, we must dree our own weird, everyone of us, a
short one; all save Rachel, who was born to live her life. Man, I tell
you, that the Spirit drives you on to convert the heathen just for one
thing, that the heathen may make a martyr of you."

"So let them," her father answered proudly. "I seek no better end."

"Aye," she moaned, sinking back upon the cartel, "so let them, but my
babe, my poor babe! Why should my babe die because too much religion has
made you mad to win a martyr's crown? Martyrs should not marry and have

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