Cinderella in the South | Page 3

arches, seemingly. They
weren't very careful about bond in building, were they? Nor were they
very careful to break joint outside, much less inside, so far as I can
judge. And the script; where is it? And the graves; where are they? If
they were Semites, why didn't they write? If they were Semites, why
didn't they bury? . . . But it isn't as easy as it looks, the riddle. There are
one or two jagged ends that conical tower, for instance.'
We camped that evening near a Mission. I admired the oblong
iron-roofed church there. It wasn't my style of art, but it seemed to me
fair of its kind.
'Quite good,' growled my expert friend, and he said no more at the time.

He spoke more freely over a last pipe.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'not to take more interest in this sort of thing. Only,
after all, it's African-built, and Europeans could do the thing a bit better,
couldn't they? This sort of thing seems rather a wrong line of advance.
If I hadn't seen Mabgwe so lately I mightn't mind so much.'
They showed us to a hut, a very clean one. 'That's better; that's ever so
much better,' he said. On the wall was a rude frieze in Bushman
painting style, but white, not red. I enlightened him as to tsenza work,
as to how you could use the cool watery roots like crayons.
'Why, that's surely Jezebel looking out of that grain-bin,' he hazarded.
'But what are those?'
'The dogs to eat her,' I answered.
They were horrid little whelps with human heads. I told him about
certain night-fears common among natives. 'It was a solid Christian
who dared to paint these,' I surmised.
'If you could only get Africans to believe what Christians believed in
the thirteenth century you might see signs and wonders yet,' he said.
He has not been our way again since April, but I met him at the
Pro-Cathedral Pageant in January. It was organized by a Pageant
Master, our mutual friend the dignitary. Therein Asia, King Solomon
and Sheba's Queen, were represented. Africa was relegated to her
proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. 'Poor creatures!' Spenser
said, with a grimace, and winked at me.
'Come, and I will show you a thing,' he said to me afterwards; 'a thing I
chanced on in the Christmas holidays. It's ten miles out. I want to
inspan at six sharp to-morrow.'
I was guilty of three omissions next day. I cut a clerical meeting; I
flouted the True Romance in the shape of the Pageant's second
performance; I also missed the bazaar of St. Uriel's Native Church that

was held on the Pageant ground. St. Uriel's structure had been put out
to European contract; it was a very didactic building, so the
Pageant-Master told us. We passed it on our way out to the kopje
country.
'About as sensuously lovely as a Pills' advertisement,' was Spenser's
comment. 'A good pity and terror purge.'
I sighed indulgently.
'It's very popular, I've heard, among the town boys. It's so very
European to native eyes, so extra corrugated and angular.'
We came up at last to that which we sought a huge ellipse and dome of
stones and earth, rising and broadening under our very eyes. It was on a
farm among the granite hills, many miles from Rosebery. 'It's only a
glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone Kaffir hut,' Spenser
commented. 'It's not even built the old Mabgwe way. These are only
blocks of granite; a few of them broken, but not one of them dressed.
And there's lots of mud to eke them out.'
'Yet there's hope in the thing. It's not an artistic dead-end like Saint
Uriel's,' I pleaded.
One or two Europeans, very unskilled ones I could see, had planned
this bit of work, and taken part in it. They had made themselves at
charges for it, though African gifts had not been wanting. They had, so
to speak, coaxed their African pack on to try an old scent. Now the
moving European spirit was gone home for months to England. Before
he went the former rains had ruined some of the work. He had been too
ambitious, too scornful of delay. Forewarned by Africans, he had
pressed to a midsummer disaster. Now he had left Africans in charge.
He had trusted them to go on. One Christian, in particular, he had
trusted his fellow and his master in building. The boy had built at a
colonial's cattle-kraal once. His skill had multiplied as he built on at the
great church, and now he was a master craftsman. Doggedly he was
building up again the rain-ruined bastions. The work was going with a
swing, if a slow one. The scent