“I say, Quatermain,” said Stephen idly, “since our friend Mavovo seems to know so much, ask him what has become of Brother John, as Hans suggested.  Tell me what he says afterwards, for I want to see something.”

So I went through the little gate in the wall in a natural kind of way, as though I had seen nothing, and appeared to be struck by the sight of the little fires.

“Well, Mavovo,” I said, “are you doing doctor’s work?  I thought that it had brought you into enough trouble in Zululand.”

“That is so, Baba,” replied Mavovo, who had a habit of calling me “father,” though he was older than I.  “It cost me my chieftainship and my cattle and my two wives and my son.  It made of me a wanderer who is glad to accompany a certain Macumazana to strange lands where many things may befall me, yes,” he added with meaning, “even the last of all things.  And yet a gift is a gift and must be used.  You, Baba, have a gift of shooting and do you cease to shoot?  You have a gift of wandering and can you cease to wander?”

He picked up one of the burnt feathers from the little pile by his side and looked at it attentively.  “Perhaps, Baba, you have been told—­my ears are very sharp, and I thought I heard some such words floating through the air just now—­that we poor Kaffir Inyangas can prophesy nothing true unless we are paid, and perhaps that is a fact so far as something of the moment is concerned.  And yet the Snake in the Inyanga, jumping over the little rock which hides the present from it, may see the path that winds far and far away through the valleys, across the streams, up the mountains, till it is lost in the ‘heaven above.’  Thus on this feather, burnt in my magic fire, I seem to see something of your future, O my father Macumazana.  Far and far your road runs,” and he drew his finger along the feather.  “Here is a journey,” and he flicked away a carbonised flake, “here is another, and another, and another,” and he flicked off flake after flake.  “Here is one that is very successful, it leaves you rich; and here is yet one more, a wonderful journey this in which you see strange things and meet strange people.  Then”—­and he blew on the feather in such a fashion that all the charred filaments (Brother John says that laminae is the right word for them) fell away from it—­“then, there is nothing left save such a pole as some of my people stick upright on a grave, the Shaft of Memory they call it.  O, my father, you will die in a distant land, but you will leave a great memory behind you that will live for hundreds of years, for see how strong is this quill over which the fire has had no power.  With some of these others it is quite different,” he added.

“I daresay,” I broke in, “but, Mavovo, be so good as to leave me out of your magic, for I don’t at all want to know what is going to happen to me.  To-day is enough for me without studying next month and next year.  There is a saying in our holy book which runs:  ’Sufficient to the day is its evil.’”