As is not very unusual with natives, the man was perfectly bald.  His back was bent, and his limbs were somewhat shrunken, but he did not appear in the least degree decrepit.  His eyelids were very red, and his eyes, though dim, had a deep and intent look.  Ugly as was the man—­or perhaps by virtue of his ugliness—­he exercised a strange fascination over Langley.

The old man, whose name turned out to be Ghamba, proved himself a talker after Langley’s own heart.  They discussed all sorts of things.  Ghamba startled his hearer by his breadth of experience and his shrewdness.  He said he was a “Hlubi” Kaffir from Qumbu, in the territory of Griqualand East, but that he had for some time past been living in Basutoland, which is situated just behind the frowning wall of the Drakensberg, to the southwest of where they were speaking, and not twenty miles distant.

They talked until it was time for Langley to return to camp.  He was so pleased at the entertainment afforded by Ghamba that all the tobacco he had with him found its way into the claw-like hand of that strange-looking man of many experiences and quaint ideas.  So Langley asked him to come to the ant-heap again on the following day, and have another talk at the same hour.  This Ghamba, with a wide and prolonged exposure of his teeth, readily agreed to do.

Langley was extremely voluble to Whitson that night over his new acquaintance.  Whitson listened with his usual impassiveness, and then asked Langley how it was that “an old loafing nigger,” as he expressed it, had impressed him so remarkably.  Langley replied that he did not quite know, but he thought the effect was largely due to the man’s teeth.  But all the same he was “a very entertaining old buffer.”

Next afternoon Langley was so impatient to resume conversation with his new friend that he repaired to the ant-heap quite half an hour before the appointed time.  He had not, however, long to wait, as Ghamba soon appeared, emerging from a donga a couple of hundred yards away.

Langley was more impressed than ever.  Ghamba told him all about the Basutos, among whom he had lived; about the old days in Natal, before even the Dutch occupation, when Tshaka’s impis wiped whole tribes out of existence; of the recent wars in Zululand and the Cape Colony, and as to the probability of future disturbances.  Charmed as was Langley by the old man’s conversation, he felt that on this occasion there was a little too much of it; that Ghamba was not nearly so good a listener as he had been on the previous day; so when the latter at length put a question to him, thus affording an opportunity for the exercise of his own pentup loquacity, Langley felt elated, more especially as several inquiries were grouped together in the one asking.  Ghamba asked whether anything had been heard of Umhlonhlo; whether the capture of that fugitive rebel was considered likely, and whether it was true that a reward of five hundred pounds had been offered by the government for his capture, dead or alive.