He had been injured by an elephant, and
lay for some months among the Makalanga to the north of Matabeleland,
where he got fever badly at a place called Bambatse, on the Zambesi.
These Makalanga are a strange folk. I believe their name means the
People of the Sun; at any rate, they are the last of some ancient
race. Well, while he was there he cured the old Molimo, or hereditary
high-priest of this tribe, of a bad fever by giving him quinine, and
naturally they grew friendly. The Molimo lived among ruins of which
there are many over all that part of South Africa. No one knows who
built them now; probably it was people who lived thousands of years ago.
However, this Molimo told Tom Jackson a more recent legend connected
with the place.
"He said that six generations before, when his great-great-great
grandfather was chief (Mambo, he called it), the natives of all
that part of South Africa rose against the white men--Portuguese, I
suppose--who still worked the gold there. They massacred them and their
slaves by thousands, driving them up from the southward, where Lobengula
rules now, to the Zambesi by which the Portuguese hoped to escape to the
coast. At length a remnant of them, not more than about two hundred men
and women, arrived at the stronghold called Bambatse, where the Molimo
now lives in a great ruin built by the ancients upon an impregnable
mountain which overhangs the river.
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