“That is true, Hans, and I thank you for the lesson, the second you have taught me to-day.  But where are we to go to, Hans?  Remember, it must be elephants.”

He suggested some places; indeed he seemed to have come provided with a list of them, and I sat silent making no comment.  At length he finished and squatted there before me, chewing a bit of tobacco I had given him, and looking up at me interrogatively with his head on one side, for all the world like a dilapidated and inquisitive bird.

“Hans,” I said, “do you remember a story I told you when you came to see me a year or more ago, about a tribe called the Kendah in whose country there is said to be a great cemetery of elephants which travel there to die from all the land about?  A country that lies somewhere to the north-east of the lake island on which the Pongo used to dwell?”

“Yes, Baas.”

“And you said, I think, that you had never heard of such a people.”

“No, Baas, I never said anything at all.  I have heard a good deal about them.”

“Then why did you not tell me so before, you little idiot?” I asked indignantly.

“What was the good, Baas?  You were hunting gold then, not ivory.  Why should I make you unhappy, and waste my own breath by talking about beautiful things which were far beyond the reach of either of us, far as that sky?”

“Don’t ask fool’s questions but tell me what you know, Hans.  Tell me at once.”

“This, Baas:  When we were up at Beza-Town after we came back from killing the gorilla-god, and the Baas Stephen your friend lay sick, and there was nothing else to do, I talked with everyone I could find worth talking to, and they were not many, Baas.  But there was one very old woman who was not of the Mazitu race and whose husband and children were all dead, but whom the people in the town looked up to and feared because she was wise and made medicines out of herbs, and told fortunes.  I used to go to see her.  She was quite blind, Baas, and fond of talking with me—­which shows how wise she was.  I told her all about the Pongo gorilla-god, of which already she knew something.  When I had done she said that he was as nothing compared with a certain god that she had seen in her youth, seven tens of years ago, when she became marriageable.  I asked her for that story, and she spoke it thus: 

“Far away to the north and east live a people called the Kendah, who are ruled over by a sultan.  They are a very great people and inhabit a most fertile country.  But all round their country the land is desolate and manless, peopled only by game, for the reason that they will suffer none to dwell there.  That is why nobody knows anything about them:  he that comes across the wilderness into that land is killed and never returns to tell of it.