I went back to the kraals, and, waking Indaba-zimbi, told him what had happened, asking him to send some one to watch the body, as I proposed to give it burial.  But next morning it was gone, and I found that the natives, hearing of the event, had taken the corpse and thrown it to the vultures with every mark of hate.  Such, then, was the end of Hendrika.

A week after Hendrika’s death I left Babyan Kraals.  The place was hateful to me now; it was a haunted place.  I sent for old Indaba-zimbi and told him that I was going.  He answered that it was well.  “The place has served your turn,” he said; “here you have won that joy which it was fated you should win, and have suffered those things that it was fated you should suffer.  Yes, and though you know it not now, the joy and the suffering, like the sunshine and the storm, are the same thing, and will rest at last in the same heaven, the heaven from which they came.  Now go, Macumazahn.”

I asked him if he was coming with me.

“No,” he answered, “our paths lie apart henceforth, Macumazahn.  We met together for certain ends.  Those ends are fulfilled.  Now each one goes his own way.  You have still many years before you, Macumazahn; my years are few.  When we shake hands here it will be for the last time.  Perhaps we may meet again, but it will not be in this world.  Henceforth we have each of us a friend the less.”

“Heavy words,” I said.

“True words,” he answered.

Well, I have little heart to write the rest of it.  I went, leaving Indaba-zimbi in charge of the place, and making him a present of such cattle and goods as I did not want.

Tota, I of course took with me.  Fortunately by this time she had almost recovered the shock to her nerves.  The baby Harry, as he was afterwards named, was a fine healthy child, and I was lucky in getting a respectable native woman, whose husband had been killed in the fight with the baboons, to accompany me as his nurse.

Slowly, and followed for a distance by all the people, I trekked away from Babyan Kraals.  My route towards Natal was along the edge of the Bad Lands, and my first night’s outspan was beneath that very tree where Stella, my lost wife, had found us as we lay dying of thirst.

I did not sleep much that night.  And yet I was glad that I had not died in the desert about eleven months before.  I felt then, as from year to year I have continued to feel while I wander through the lonely wilderness of life, that I had been preserved to an end.  I had won my darling’s love, and for a little while we had been happy together.  Our happiness was too perfect to endure.  She is lost to me now, but she is lost to be found again.

Here on the following morning I bade farewell to Indaba-zimbi.