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Updated: May 12, 2025
"Den you please hand him over dat pebble you find. Me got me orders. King Khatsua no want any diamond digging in Barolong land." Granville tried to parley with the categorical native; but his attempts at palaver were eminently unsuccessful. The naked black man was master of the situation.
King Khatsua stood before them, a tall, full-blooded black, in European costume, with a round felt hat and a crimson tie, surrounded by his naked wives and attendants. In his outstretched hand he held before their faces two incriminating diamonds. He spoke to them with much dignity at considerable length in the Barolong tongue, to a running accompaniment of laudatory exclamations "Oh, my King!
"You hand over dat stone, me friend," he said, assuming a menacing attitude, and holding out his hand once more with no very gentle air, "or me run you trew de body wit me assegai just so! King Khatsua, him no want any diamond diggings in Barolong land."
When Cyril Waring received that note next morning he kissed it reverently, and put it away in his desk among a bundle of others. But he said to himself sternly in his own soul for all that, "Never, while Guy still rests under that cloud! And how it's ever to be lifted from him is to me inconceivable." In Africa, meanwhile, during those eighteen months, King Khatsua had kept his royal word.
King Khatsua was about to concentrate his forces for an attack on a neighbouring black monarch, as powerful and perhaps as cruel as himself, Montisive of the Bush Veldt. Slowly the preparations went on all around. Then the great day came at last, and King Khatsua set forth on his mighty campaign, to the sound of big drums and the blare of native trumpets.
"King Khatsua not a fool!" he answered at last, after a rhetorical pause. "King Khatsua no want to give up his land to white man. If you two white man go back to Kimberley, you tell plenty other people, 'Diamonds in Barolong land. You say, 'Come along o' me to Barolong land with gun; we show you where to dig 'um! No, no, King Khatsua not a fool. King Khatsua say this.
And, indeed, Granville Kelmscott couldn't help admitting to himself, when he came to think of it, that King Khatsua was acting wisely in his generation. For the introduction of diggers into his dominions would surely have meant, as everywhere else, the speedy proclamation of a British protectorate, and the final annihilation of King Khatsua himself and his dusky fellow-countrymen.
No allow white man dig here for diamonds. If white man come, him eat up Barolong. Keep white man out; keep land for King Khatsua." "Does King Khatsua want us to leave his country, then?" Granville Kelmscott asked, with a distinct tremor in his voice, for the great chief and his followers looked decidedly hostile. The interpreter threw back his head and laughed a loud long laugh.
"Dis land King Khatsua's," he repeated once more, in an angry voice. "All diamonds found on it belong to King Khatsua. Just you hand dat over. No steal; no tief-ee." The instincts of the land-owning class were too strong in Granville Kelmscott not to make him admit at once to himself the justice of this claim. The owner of the soil had a right to the diamonds.
Next the voice spoke in English; it was Granville's captor, he now knew well. "White men, you come out; King Khatsua himself, him go to 'peak to you." They crawled out, one at a time, in sorry guise, through the narrow hole. It was a pitiful exhibition. Were it not for the danger and uncertainty of the event, they could almost themselves have fairly laughed at it.
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