BARBARITY OF THE MATABELE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue II, 11 July 1896, Page 59

BARBARITY OF THE MATABELE.

Mr L. Creagh-Howard, who at the outbreak of the Matabele rebellion was engaged in commercial pursuits at Buluwayo, and has since served against the rebels, writing on April 3rd to a friend in Wiltshire, gives an account of the horrible and often nameless mutilations inflicted by the rebels on the bodies of the unfortunate whites surprised and murdered at out lying districts and of the few troopers whose remains fell into the hands of the Matabele. • You cannot imagine,’ he writes, ‘ the diabolical and hellish atrocities these black brutes have committed. Some poor fellows we fear have been tortured to death. One poor Cape boy who remained faithful was found with his mouth slit from ear to ear and his head smashed in with a knobkerrie, besides having five assegai wounds, and yet after four days he still lived. Many native police deserted, and forty of them attacked a waggon with two men in it. One, Stephenson I think, was killed as he slept ; the other, Cummings, shot forty niggers before he died. Over eighty men have been killed, and some women and children. Mr Creaghe-Howard significantly concludes his letter :— ‘ Every one of us here has his life in bis hands now. We may be attacked at any moment; but if we die here, many a Kafir will die with us, and our women will not fall alive into the Matabele bands.’

Many coral reef islands in the Pacific are in the form of more or less perfect rings, or ovals, enclosing lagoons. Recently a description was presented to the Royal Geographical Society of the ring island of Ninafou, halfway between Fiji and Samoa, which is not a coral reef but a volcanic ring enclosing a crater containing a lake two miles in diameter. Toward the sea the ring is bordered with walls of black lava, and on the inner side these break down in cliffs 200 to 300 feet in height. An emotion in 1886 formed a peninsula on the eastern side of the lake While the ocean outside is trembling and thundering under a heavy wind, the lake remains smooth, or is simply wrinkled with ripples.