Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress Read Online Free PDF Page B

qualities I covet and whose biltong I have shared with grateful pleasure.
    2 And bears a distinct resemblance, in manner as in intention, to Ian Smith’s Declaration of Rhodesian Independence, 1965.
    1 Whether Rex was really royal, or whether as cynics claimed he sprang from the well-known Rex family of Whitechapel, nobody knows to this day. Modern Knysna romantics believe him to have been the son of George’s Quaker mistress Hannah Lightfoot, and fancy they detect Hanoverian profiles in the village even now: but his tombstone in the Melkhout Kraal woods says simply: In memory of George Rex Esquire, Proprietor and Founder of Knysna, Died 3rd April, 1839 .
    1 Where he died of starvation in 1851, the last survivor of a private mission of seven Englishmen landed on Picton Island, off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, to convert the hostile natives to Christianity.
    1 It still stands, and contains in its powder magazine, now a chapel, a Pantheon of Natal’s worthies—every one, as it happens, British.
    1 The church, though it was neglected for nearly a century and was once used as a tea-room, is now restored as the Church of the Vow, while in 1952 Dingaan’s Day, December 16, was re-named the Day of the Covenant. Hardline Afrikaners still resent the participation of English-speaking South Africans in this national festival, and in 1972 Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of the Zulus awkwardly complicated the issue by suggesting that perhaps some Zulus might be invited too.

CHAPTER FOUR
Roots into their Soil
    O N the dirt road west of Mirzapur on the Ganges, perhaps 700 miles from Calcutta, there stood the temple of the goddess Kali at Bindhachal. It was a tumultuous and exotic shrine, especially at the end of the rainy season, when supplicants came from all over India to propitiate the goddess. The air was aromatic then with incense and blossom, dust swirled about the temple walls, the tracks were crowded with bullock-carts, wandering cows, beggars and barefoot pilgrims. Night and day goats were sacrificed, their blood spilling down the temple steps, and sometimes one heard the shrieks of devotees, tranced in ecstasy or bloody themselves with flagellation, invoking the blessings of the divinity—Kali the terrible, Kali the blood-goddess, consort of Shiva the destroyer, naked, black and furious, with her sword, her noose, and her bludgeon stuck all about with human skulls—Kali the dark one, with the protruding tongue and the bloodshot eyes, haunter of the burning ground, in whose heart death and terror festered.
    This was the holy place of the Thugs, the hereditary fraternity of stranglers, who had for hundreds of years terrorized the travellers of India. Their secret society had branches and adherents from the Indus to Bengal, and they had their own hierarchy, rituals and traditions, and believed that when they strangled strangers on the road, they were strangling in Kali’s cause—for Kali herself, when she had strangled the demon Rukt Bij-dana in the dawn of the world, had created two men from the sweat of her brow, and ordered them to strangle, and their posterity after them, all men who were not their kindred.
    Thuggee enjoyed the secret protection of rajas and rich men, Muslim as well as Hindu, besides the terrified complicity of thepeasantry. It was an ancient secret of India—the mutilated corpse at the bottom of the well, the silent stranger at the door, the unexplained subsidy, the whisper at the cross-roads. At Bindhachal was the priesthood of the cult. There, once a year, the stranglers went to pay their dues to the priests of Kali, and to receive their sacred instructions in return: where they should operate in the following year, what fees they should bring back to the shrine, what rituals they were to perform, if they were to enjoy the protection of the goddess—for if they neglected their obligations, homeless spirits they must become, to linger without hope in the empyrean.
    To the British rulers in India, Thuggee