Meantime they were king’s children, and it behooved them to carry themselves as such in the presence of the enemy.  Wherefore did they neither cry nor grieve (outwardly), nor sulk, nor cast themselves down or about with despair or rage.  They just sat down side by side, and put their heads together, and stared with haughty insolence at the common crowd, “the lesser breeds without the law,” who gathered to inspect them.  It is not every day men get a chance to spit at and make mock of a king’s son, whose father, as like as not, killed one’s mother or little brother with no more thought than you or I would kill a rabbit, and the crowd made the most of that chance.

But luckily night, who was their godfather, came stalking swiftly westward, as he does in those wild parts, and flung his protecting cloak over them, and the crowd melted to its fleshpots, and the magic of the dark settled down over all.

One by one the little lights twinkled out in the huts and tents of their captors, and the deep bass drone of men’s voices within mingled with the shrill cackle of women, and the high song of the mosquitoes without; and the smell of cooking and tobacco together came to them, so that they sniffed aloofly and stirred from their places.

A pariah dog, lean and yellow, came to eye them furtively through the chinks of the corrugated iron, and the horses snorted and stamped in their pickets, as the night breeze carried to them their scent.

Time passed, and the shrill voices of the women-folk ceased, the deep mutter of the men died gradually down, the lights faded, the scene was lit up only here and there by the sudden glow of a fire kicked into blaze by a sentry, but the song of the mosquitoes never ceased.

Then arose and uprose the strange, uncanny voices of the night, which, taken together, made up a background to the great silence which they seemed to accentuate.  And the king’s son bounded again.  They were to him as a mighty call, those voices, from his own land—­the land of the wilderness.

The rumbling thunder of his father’s rage, breathing of death and destruction, had ceased now; but there were plenty more sounds, and the king’s son, listening, knew them all.  The distant “Qua-ha-ha!” of a troop of zebras going to drink; the peculiar snort of an impala antelope, scenting danger; the far-away drumming of hoofs of a startled herd of hartebeests; the bleat of an eland calf, pulled down by who knows what; the “Hoot-toot!” of a hippopotamus, going out to grass; the sudden shrill “Ya-ya-ya-ya!” of a black-backed jackal close at hand; the yarly, snarly whines of a hunting leopard; the snap of a crocodile’s jaws, somewhere down in the nearby river; and, last, but by no means least in ghostliness, the awful rising “Who-oo!” followed by a sudden mad chorus of maniacal laughter, which told that somewhere a gathering of hyenas were—­at their work!

The king’s son was moving about the prison now, examining what he could see—­especially of the walls—­with his wonderful, proud eyes, and what he could not with whiskers and nose.  He made no sound, of course—­not so much as a whisper; and when his sister joined him, they were simply intangible, half-guessed shapes, drifting—­there is no other word for it—­through the gloom.