“You look after yourself, and think of your own sins, young man,” he answered, with a grim smile, and taking a pinch of snuff, while at that very moment a flash of lightning, I don’t know from which storm, struck the ground within thirty paces of me.  That was enough for me, I took to my heels, and as I went I heard old Indaba-zimbi’s dry chuckle of amusement.

I climbed the hill till I came to where the chief was sitting with his indunas, or headmen, and sat down near to him.  I looked at the man’s face and saw that he was intensely anxious for his son’s safety, and by no means confident of the young man’s powers to resist the magic of Indaba-zimbi.  He was talking in a low voice to the induna next to him.  I affected to take no notice and to be concentrating my attention on the novel scene before me; but in those days I had very quick ears, and caught the drift of the conversation.

“Hearken!” the chief was saying, “if the magic of Indaba-zimbi prevails against my son I will endure him no more.  Of this I am sure, that when he has slain my son he will slay me, me also, and make himself chief in my place.  I fear Indaba-zimbi. Ou!”

“Black One,” answered the induna, “wizards die as dogs die, and, once dead, dogs bark no more.”

“And once dead,” said the chiefs, “wizards work no more spells,” and he bent and whispered in the induna’s ear, looking at the assegai in his hand as he whispered.

“Good, my father, good!” said the induna, presently.  “It shall be done to-night, if the lightning does not do it first.”

“A bad look-out for old Indaba-zimbi,” I said to myself.  “They mean to kill him.”  Then I thought no more of the matter for a while, the scene before me was too tremendous.

The two storms were rapidly rushing together.  Between them was a gulf of blue sky, and from time to time flashes of blinding light passed across this gulf, leaping from cloud to cloud.  I remember that they reminded me of the story of the heathen god Jove and his thunderbolts.  The storm that was shaped like a giant and ringed with the glory of the sinking sun made an excellent Jove, and I am sure that the bolts which leapt from it could not have been surpassed even in mythological times.  Oddly enough, as yet the flashes were not followed by thunder.  A deadly stillness lay upon the place, the cattle stood silently on the hillside, even the natives were awed to silence.  Dark shadows crept along the bosom of the hills, the river to the right and left was hidden in wreaths of cloud, but before us and beyond the combatants it shone like a line of silver beneath the narrowing space of open sky.  Now the western tempest was scrawled all over with lines of intolerable light, while the inky head of the cloud-giant to the east was continually suffused with a white and deadly glow that came and went in pulses, as though a blood of flame was being pumped into it from the heart of the storm.