“She told me also that she was born of this people, but fled because their sultan wished to place her in his house of women, which she did not desire.  For a long while she wandered southwards, living on roots and berries, till she came to desert land and at last, worn out, lay down to die.  Then she was found by some of the Mazitu who were on an expedition seeking ostrich feathers for war-plumes.  They gave her food and, seeing that she was fair, brought her back to their country, where one of them married her.  But of her own land she uttered only lying words to them because she feared that if she told the truth the gods who guard its secrets would be avenged on her, though now when she was near to death she dreaded them no more, since even the Kendah gods cannot swim through the waters of death.  That is all she said about her journey because she had forgotten the rest.”

“Bother her journey, Hans.  What did she say about her god and the Kendah people?”

“This, Baas:  that the Kendah have not one god but two, and not one ruler but two.  They have a good god who is a child-fetish” (here I started) “that speaks through the mouth of an oracle who is always a woman.  If that woman dies the god does not speak until they find another woman bearing certain marks which show that she holds the spirit of the god.  Before the woman dies she always tells the priests in what land they are to look for her who is to come after her; but sometimes they cannot find her and then trouble falls because ‘the Child has lost its tongue,’ and the people become the prey of the other god that never dies.”

“And what is that god, Hans?”

“That god, Baas, is an elephant” (here I started again), “a very bad elephant to which human sacrifice is offered.  I think, Baas, that it is the devil wearing the shape of an elephant, at least that is what she said.  Now the sultan is a worshipper of the god that dwells in the elephant Jana” (here I positively whistled) “and so are most of the people, indeed all those among them who are black.  For once far away in the beginning the Kendah were two peoples, but the lighter-coloured people who worshipped the Child came down from the north and conquered the black people, bringing the Child with them, or so I understood her, Baas, thousands and thousands of years ago when the world was young.  Since then they have flowed on side by side like two streams in the same channel, never mixing, for each keeps its own colour.  Only, she said, that stream which comes from the north grows weaker and that from the south more strong.”

“Then why does not the strong swallow up the weak?”