broken the pact, working us more harm, and therefore it no longer holds, since there are many other ways in which men can die.  Listen again!  This is my decree.  By your magic you have taken away the life of one of my servants and hurt another of my servants, destroying the middle toe of his left foot.  If within three days you do not give back the life to him who seems to be dead, and give back the toe to him who seems to be hurt, as you well can do, then you shall join those whom you have slain in the land of death, how I will not tell you.”

Now when I heard this amazing sentence I gasped within myself, but thinking it better to keep up my role of understanding nothing of their talk, I preserved an immovable countenance and left Marut to answer.  This, to his credit be it recorded, he did with his customary pleasant smile.

“O King,” he said, “who can bring the dead back to life?  Not even the Child itself, at any rate in this world, for there is no way.”

“Then, Prophet of the Child, you had better find a way, or, I repeat, I send you to join them,” he shouted, rolling his eyes.

“What did my brother, the great Prophet, promise to you but yesterday, O King, if you harmed us?” asked Marut.  “Was it not that the three great curses should fall upon your people?  Learn now that if so much as one of us is murdered by you, these things shall swiftly come to pass.  I, Marut, who am also a Prophet of the Child, have said it.”

Now Simba seemed to go quite mad, so mad that I thought all was over.  He waved his spear and danced about in front of us, till the silver chains clanked upon his breast.  He vituperated the Child and its worshippers, who, he declared, had worked evil on the Black Kendah for generations.  He appealed to his god Jana to avenge these evils, “to pierce the Child with his tusks, to tear it with his trunk, and to trample it with his feet,” all of which the wounded diviner ably seconded through his horrid mask.

There we stood before him, I leaning against the wall of the house with an air of studied nonchalance mingled with mild interest, at least that is what I meant to do, and Marut smiling sweetly and staring at the heavens.  Whilst I was wondering what exact portion of my frame was destined to become acquainted with that spear, of a sudden Simba gave it up.  Turning to his followers, he bade them dig a hole in the corner of our little enclosure and set the dead man in it, “with his head out so that he may breathe,” an order which they promptly executed.

Then he issued a command that we should be well fed and tended, and remarking that if the departed was not alive and healthy on the third morning from that day, we should hear from him again, he and his company stalked off, except those men who were occupied with the interment.

Soon this was finished also.  There sat the deceased buried to the neck with his face looking towards the house, a most disagreeable sight.  Presently, however, matters were improved in this respect by one of the sextons fetching a large earthenware pot and several smaller pots full of food and water.  The latter they set round the head, I suppose for the sustenance of the body beneath, and then placed the big vessel inverted over all, “to keep the sun off our sleeping brother,” as I heard one say to the other.