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Updated: June 13, 2025
If you bring me to him, I and he will reward you; but if you do Inkulu's bidding you will soon be hunted like buck out of your hills. They grinned at one another, but I could see that my words had no effect. Laputa had done his business too well. The spokesman shrugged his shoulders in the way the Kaffirs have. 'We wish you no ill, Baas, but we have been bidden to take you to Inkulu.
He is, in consequence, high in favour with Master Simon; and, through his influence, has the making, or rather marring, of all the liveries of the Hall; which generally look as though they had been cut out by one of those scientific tailors of the Flying Island of Laputa, who took measure of their customers with a quadrant.
The password might be wrong, or I might never get the length of those who knew it. The men in the cave might butcher me out of hand, or Laputa might think my behaviour a sufficient warrant for the breach of the solemnest vow. Colin might never get to Blaauwildebeestefontein, Laputa might change his route of march, or Arcoll's men might fail to hold the Drift.
I noticed that Laputa kept well in cover, preferring the tangle of wooded undergrowth to the open spaces of the water-meadows. As he talked, his wary eyes were keeping a sharp look-out over the landscape. I thrilled with the thought that my own folk were near at hand. Once Laputa checked me with his hand as I was going to speak, and in silence we crossed the kloof of a little stream.
If he failed there, he must try to ford the Letaba below the drift, and cross the road between the drift and Wesselsburg. Now Arcoll had not men enough to watch the whole line, and therefore if Laputa were once driven below the drift, he must shift his men farther down the road.
It was a fine speech, and yet I saw that it did not convince them. They listened moodily, if attentively, and at the end there was a blank silence. Arcoll turned to me. 'For God's sake, Davie, he said, 'talk to them about Laputa. It's our only chance. I had never tried speaking before, and though I talked their tongue I had not Arcoll's gift of it.
If I had my will, I would go in and stick a knife in the drunken hog next door. 'He is safe enough, Laputa replied. 'I gave him the chance of life, and he laughed at me. He won't get far on his road home. This was pleasant hearing for me, but I scarcely thought of myself. I was consumed with a passion of fury against the murdering yellow devil.
But it was his duty to isolate Laputa's army, and at all costs, it must be prevented from joining any of the concentrations in the south. Then I proposed to him to do as Rhodes did in the Matoppos, and go and talk to them. By this time, I argued, the influence of Laputa must have sunk, and the fervour of the purification be half-forgotten. The army had little food and no leader.
This is probably an allusion to the flappers in Gulliver's Travels the servants who, in Laputa, carried bladders with which every now and then they flapped the mouths and ears of their employers, to recall them to themselves and disperse their meditations. Better was not concerned. At these words, in the London Magazine, came:
I saw myself caught and carried off to Laputa, who must now be close on the rendezvous at Inanda's Kraal. I had no weapon to make a fight for it. My foemen were many and untired. It must be only a matter of minutes till I was in their hands. More in a dogged fury of disappointment than with any hope of escape I forced my sore legs up the glen.
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