“You seem to have a little yellow man in your service, a clever snake who knows how to creep through grass, and when to strike and when to lie hidden.  I should take him too, if I were you.”

“You know well that I have such a man, Zikali, a Hottentot named Hans, clever in his way but drunken, very faithful too, since he loved my father before me.  He is cooking my supper in the waggon now.  Are there to be any others?”

“No, I think you three will be enough, with a guard of soldiers from the People of the Axe, for you will meet with fighting and a ghost or two.  Umslopogaas has always one at his elbow named Nada, and perhaps you have several.  For instance, there was a certain Mameena whom I always seem to feel about me when you are near, Macumazahn.

“Why, the wind is rising again, which is odd on so still an evening.  Listen to how it wails, yes, and stirs your hair, though mine hangs straight enough.  But why do I talk of ghosts, seeing that you travel to seek other ghosts, white ghosts, beyond my ken, who can only deal with those who were black?

“Good-night, Macumazahn, good-night.  When you return from visiting the white Queen, that Great One beneath those feet I, Zikali, who am also great in my way, am but a grain of dust, come and tell me her answer to my question.

“Meanwhile, be careful always to wear that pretty little image which I have given you, as a young lover sometimes wears a lock of hair cut from the head of some fool-girl that he thinks is fond of him.  It will bring you safety and luck, Macumazahn, which, for the most part, is more than the lock of hair does to the lover.  Oh! it is a strange world, full of jest to those who can see the strings that work it.  I am one of them, and perhaps, Macumazahn, you are another, or will be before all is done—­or begun.

“Good-night, and good fortune to you on your journeyings, and, Macumazahn, although you are so fond of women, be careful not to fall in love with that white Queen, because it would make others jealous; I mean some who you have lost sight of for a while, also I think that being under a curse of her own, she is not one whom you can put into your sack. Oho!  Oho-ho! Slave, bring me my blanket, it grows cold, and my medicine also, that which protects me from the ghosts, who are thick to-night.  Macumazahn brings them, I think. Oho-ho!”

I turned to depart but when I had gone a little way Zikali called me back again and said, speaking very low,

“When you meet this Umslopogaas, as you will meet him, he who is called the Woodpecker and the Slaughterer, say these words to him,

“’A bat has been twittering round the hut of the Opener-of-Roads, and to his ears it squeaked the name of a certain Lousta and the name of a woman called Monazi.  Also it twittered another greater name that may not be uttered, that of an elephant who shakes the earth, and said that this elephant sniffs the air with his trunk and grows angry, and sharpens his tusks to dig a certain Woodpecker out of his hole in a tree that grows near the Witch Mountain.  Say, too, that the Opener-of-Roads thinks that this Woodpecker would be wise to fly north for a while in the company of one who watches by night, lest harm should come to a bird that pecks at the feet of the great and chatters of it in his nest.’”