“The head man replied that that was a good saying, and they did not complain at it, and so the meeting ended.

“Next day we spent in preparations for departure.  Mine consisted chiefly in superintending the digging up of the stockade of ivory tusks, which I did with the greatest satisfaction.  There were some five hundred of them altogether.  I made inquiries about it from Every, who told me that the stockade had been there so long that nobody seemed to know exactly who had collected the tusks originally.  There was, however, a kind of superstitious feeling about them which had always prevented the chiefs from trying to sell this great mass of ivory.  Every and I examined it carefully, and found that although it was so old its quality was really as good as ever, and there was very little soft ivory in the lot.  At first I was rather afraid lest, now that my services had been rendered, Nala should hesitate to part with so much valuable property, but this was not the case.  When I spoke to him on the subject he merely said, ‘Take it, Macumazahn, take it; you have earned it well,’ and, to speak the truth, though I say it who shouldn’t, I think I had.  So we pressed several hundred Matuku bearers into our service, and next day marched off with the lot.

“Before we went I took a formal farewell of Maiwa, whom we left with a bodyguard of three hundred men to assist her in settling the country.  She gave me her hand to kiss in a queenly sort of way, and then said,

“’Macumazahn, you are a brave man, and have been a friend to me in my need.  If ever you want help or shelter, remember that Maiwa has a good memory for friend and foe.  All I have is yours.

“And so I thanked her and went.  She was certainly a very remarkable woman.  A year or two ago I heard that her father Nala was dead, and that she had succeeded to the chieftainship of both tribes, which she ruled with great justice and firmness.

“I can assure you that we ascended the pass leading to Wambe’s town with feelings very different from those with which we had descended it a few days before.  But if I was grateful for the issue of events, you can easily imagine what poor Every’s feelings were.  When we got to the top of the pass, before the whole impi he actually flopped down upon his knees and thanked Heaven for his escape, the tears running down his face.  But then, as I have said, his nerves were shaken—­though now that his beard was trimmed and he had some sort of clothes on his back, and hope in his heart, he looked a very different man from the poor wretch whom we had rescued from death by torture.

“Well, we separated from Nala at the little stairway or pass over the mountain—­Every and I and the ivory going down the river which I had come up a few weeks before, and the chief returning to his own kraal on the further side of the mountain.  He gave us an escort of a hundred and fifty men, however, with instructions to accompany us for six days’ journey, and to keep the Matuku bearers in order and then return.  I knew that in six days we should be able to reach a district where porters were plentiful, and whence we could easily get the ivory conveyed to Delagoa Bay.”