Benita, An African Romance | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] Dagny,
[email protected] and Emma Dudding, [email protected]

Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] Emma Dudding,
[email protected] and Dagny, [email protected]

BENITA AN AFRICAN ROMANCE
by H. RIDER HAGGARD

NOTES
It may interest readers of this story to know that its author believes it to
have a certain foundation in fact.
It was said about five-and-twenty or thirty years ago that an
adventurous trader, hearing from some natives in the territory that lies
at the back of Quilimane, the legend of a great treasure buried in or
about the sixteenth century by a party of Portuguese who were
afterwards massacred, as a last resource attempted its discovery by the
help of a mesmerist. According to this history the child who was used
as a subject in the experiment, when in a state of trance, detailed the
adventures and death of the unhappy Portuguese men and women, two
of whom leapt from the point of a high rock into the Zambesi.
Although he knew no tongue but English, this clairvoyant child is
declared to have repeated in Portuguese the prayers these unfortunates
offered up, and even to have sung the very hymns they sang. Moreover,
with much other detail, he described the burial of the great treasure and
its exact situation so accurately that the white man and the mesmerist
were able to dig for and find the place where /it had been/--for the bags
were gone, swept out by the floods of the river.

Some gold coins remained, however, one of them a ducat of Aloysius
Mocenigo, Doge of Venice. Afterwards the boy was again thrown into
a trance (in all he was mesmerized eight times), and revealed where the
sacks still lay; but before the white trader could renew his search for
them, the party was hunted out of the country by natives whose
superstitious fears were aroused, barely escaping with their lives.
It should be added that, as in the following tale, the chief who was
ruling there when the tragedy happened, declared the place to be sacred,
and that if it were entered evil would befall his tribe. Thus it came
about that for generations it was never violated, until at length his
descendants were driven farther from the river by war, and from one of
them the white man heard the legend.

BENITA
AN AFRICAN ROMANCE

I
CONFIDENCES
Beautiful, beautiful was that night! No air that stirred; the black smoke
from the