“Here’s a nice position,” I groaned to Stephen when he had gone.  “I, a white man, who, in spite of some coincidences with which I am acquainted, know that all this Kaffir magic is bosh am to beg a savage to tell me something of which he must be ignorant.  That is, unless we educated people have got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether.  It is humiliating; it isn’t Christian, and I’m hanged if I’ll do it!”

“I dare say you will be—­hanged I mean—­whether you do it or whether you don’t,” replied Stephen with his sweet smile.  “But I say, old fellow, how do you know it is all bosh?  We are told about lots of miracles which weren’t bosh, and if miracles ever existed, why can’t they exist now?  But there, I know what you mean and it is no use arguing.  Still, if you’re proud, I ain’t.  I’ll try to soften the stony heart of Mavovo—­we are rather pals, you know—­and get him to unroll the book of his occult wisdom,” and he went.

A few minutes later I was called out to receive a sheep which, with milk, native beer, some corn, and other things, including green forage for the donkeys, Bausi had sent for us to eat.  Here I may remark that while we were among the Mazitu we lived like fighting cocks.  There was none of that starvation which is, or was, so common in East Africa where the traveller often cannot get food for love or money—­generally because there is none.

When this business was settled by my sending a message of thanks to the king with an intimation that we hoped to wait upon him on the morrow with a few presents, I went to seek Sammy in order to tell him to kill and cook the sheep.  After some search I found, or rather heard him beyond a reed fence which divided two of the huts.  He was acting as interpreter between Stephen Somers and Mavovo.

“This Zulu man declares, Mr. Somers,” he said, “that he quite understands everything you have been explaining, and that it is probable that we shall all be butchered by this savage Bausi, if we cannot tell him when the white man, Dogeetah, whom he loves, will arrive here.  He says also that he thinks that by his magic he could learn when this will happen—­if it is to happen at all—­(which of course, Mr. Somers, for your private information only, is a mighty lie of the ignorant heathen).  He adds, however, that he does not care one brass farthing—­his actual expression, Mr. Somers, is ’one grain of corn on a mealie-cob’—­about his or anybody else’s life, which from all I have heard of his proceedings I can well believe to be true.  He says in his vulgar language that there is no difference between the belly of a Mazitu-land hyena and that of any other hyena, and that the earth of Mazitu-land is as welcome to his bones as any other earth, since the earth is the wickedest of all hyenas, in that he has observed that soon or late it devours everlastingly everything which once it bore.  You must forgive me for reproducing his empty and childish talk, Mr. Somers, but you bade me to render