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He pointed to the darkening forest path down which they had come. "Many have been sacrificed and none heard them," he said, "this I know now. Let there be an end to killing, for I am M'gani, the Walker of the Night, and very terrible." "Wa!" screamed Lamalana, and leapt at him with clawing hands and her white teeth agrin.
She laughed loudly and hoarsely, making the silent forest ring with harsh noise. "O ko!" she said, then laughed no more. In the centre of the path was a man; in the half light she saw the leopard skin and the strange belt of metal about his waist. "O Lamalana," he said softly, "laugh gently, for I have quick ears and I smell blood."
They called Lamalana the barren woman, the Drinker of Life, but she had at least drunken without ostentation, and if she murdered with her own large hands, or staked men and women from a sheer lust of cruelty, there were none alive to speak against her. Outside the town of Lombobo was a patch of beaten ground where no grass grew, and this place was called "wa boma," the killing ground.
In ten minutes the fighting regiments of the Ochori were sweeping through the forest, trackers going ahead to pick up the trail. "Let all gods hear me," sobbed Bosambo, as he ran, "and send M'gani swiftly to M'sambo my son." "Now this is very wonderful," said Lamalana, "and it seems, O my father, no matter for a small killing, but for a sacrifice such as all men may see."
And they talked and walked, and Lombobo huntsmen, returning through the wood, gave them a wide berth, for Lamalana was possessed of an eye which was notoriously evil. "Let us go back to the city," said Lamalana, "for now I see that you are very brave and not a blind old man." "There will be a great palaver and who knows but M'ilitani will come with his soldiers?"
Here, before the white men came, sacrifices were made openly, and it was perhaps for this association and because it was, from its very openness, free from the danger of the eavesdropper, that Lamalana and her father would sit by the hour, whilst he told her the story of ancient horrors never too horrible for the woman who swayed to and fro as she listened as one who was hypnotized.
He walked forward, lifted the children in his two arms and went slowly through the people, who parted in terror at his coming. He turned at the top of the basin to speak. "Do no wickedness," said he; then he gently stooped to put the children on the ground, for mouthing and bellowing senseless sounds Lamalana came furiously after him, her long, crooked knife in her hand.
All the Lombobo people, the warriors and the hunters, the wives and the maidens, and even the children of tender years, lined the steep slopes of the Cup of Sacrifice. For Lamalana, deaf and blind to reason, knew that her hour was short, and that with the sun would come a man terrible in his anger ... and the soldiers who eat up opposition with fire. "O people!" she cried.
B'limi Saka, the chief of the land, himself a believer in devils, was especially perturbed lest the Silent Walker should be a spy of Government, for he had been guilty of practices which were particularly obnoxious to the white men who were so swift to punish. Lamalana, with her man shoulders and her flat face, peered at her grizzled father sideways.
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