Miss Holmes and the other ladies looked at me with amused disbelief, and to my dismay the venerable Harut turned to Miss Holmes, and with his inevitable bow, said in broken English: 

“Mameena very beautiful woman, perhaps more beautiful than you, lady.  Mameena love the white lord Macumazana.  She love him while she live, she love him now she dead.  She tell me so again just now.  You ask white lord tell you pretty story of how he kiss her before she kill herself.”

Needless to say all this very misleading information was received by the audience with an attention that I can but call rapt, and in a kind of holy silence which was broken only by a sudden burst of sniggering on the part of Scroope.  I favoured him with my fiercest frown.  Then I fell upon that venerable villain Harut, and belaboured him in Bantu, while the audience listened as intently as though they understood.

I asked him what he meant by coming here to asperse my character.  I asked him who the deuce he was.  I asked him how he came to know anything about Mameena, and finally I told him that soon or late I would be even with him, and paused exhausted.

He stood there looking for all the world like a statue of the patriarch Job as I imagine him, and when I had done, replied without moving a muscle and in English: 

“O Lord, Zikali, Zulu wizard, friend of mine!  All great wizard friend just like all elephant and all snake.  Zikali make me know Mameena, and she tell me story and send you much love, and say she wait for you always.” (More sniggers from Scroope, and still intenser interest evinced by Miss Holmes and others.) “If you like, I show you Mameena ’fore I go.” (Murmurs from Miss Holmes and Miss Manners of “Oh, please do!”) “But that very little business, for what one long-ago lady out of so many?”

Then suddenly he broke into Bantu, and added:  “A jest is a jest, Macumazana, though often there is meaning in a jest, and you shall see Mameena if you will.  I come here to ask you to do my people a service for which you shall not lack reward.  We, the White Kendah, the People of the Child, are at war with the Black Kendah, our subjects who outnumber us.  The Black Kendah have an evil spirit for a god, which spirit from the beginning has dwelt in the largest elephant in all the world, a beast that none can kill, but which kills many and bewitches more.  While that elephant, which is named Jana, lives we, the People of the Child, go in terror, for day by day it destroys us.  We have learned—­how it does not matter—­that you alone can kill that elephant.  If you will come and kill it, we will show you the place where all the elephants go to die, and you shall take their ivory, many wagon-loads, and grow rich.  Soon you are going on a journey that has to do with a flower, and you will visit peoples named the Mazitu and the Pongo who live on an island in a lake.  Far beyond the Pongo and across the desert dwell my people, the Kendah, in a secret land.