“Why do you say that, Quatermain?”

By way of answer I repeated to him the story which Hans said he had heard from the old woman at Beza, the town of the Mazitu.  Lord Ragnall listened with the deepest interest, then said in an agitated voice: 

“That is a very strange tale, but has it struck you, Quatermain, that if your suppositions are correct, one of the most terrible circumstances connected with my case is that our child should have chanced to come to its dreadful death through the wickedness of an elephant?”

“That curious coincidence has struck me most forcibly, Lord Ragnall.  At the same time I do not see how it can be set down as more than a coincidence, since the elephant which slaughtered your child was certainly not that called Jana.  To suppose because there is a war between an elephant-god and a child-god somewhere in the heart of Africa, that therefore another elephant can be so influenced that it kills a child in England, is to my mind out of all reason.”

That is what I said to him, as I did not wish to introduce a new horror into an affair that was already horrible enough.  But, recollecting that these priests, Harut and Marut, believed the mother of this murdered infant to be none other than the oracle of their worship (though how this chanced passed my comprehension), and therefore the great enemy of the evil elephant-god, I confess that at heart I felt afraid.  If any powers of magic, black or white or both, were mixed up with the matter as my experiences in England seemed to suggest, who could say what might be their exact limits?  As, however, it has been demonstrated again and again by the learned that no such thing as African magic exists, this line of thought appeared to be too foolish to follow.  So passing it by I asked Lord Ragnall to continue.

“For over a month,” he went on, “I stopped in Egypt waiting till emissaries who had been sent to the chiefs of various tribes in the Sudan and elsewhere, returned with the news that nothing whatsoever had been seen of a white woman travelling in the company of natives, nor had they heard of any such woman being sold as a slave.  Also through the Khedive, on whom I was able to bring influence to bear by help of the British Government, I caused many harems in Egypt to be visited, entirely without result.  After this, leaving the inquiry in the hands of the British Consul and a firm of French lawyers, although in truth all hope had gone, I returned to England whither I had already sent Lady Longden, broken-hearted, for it occurred to me as possible that my wife might have drifted or been taken thither.  But here, too, there was no trace of her or of anybody who could possibly answer to her description.  So at last I came to the conclusion that her bones must lie somewhere at the bottom of the Nile, and gave way to despair.”

“Always a foolish thing to do,” I remarked.