not
written in the history of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy
of Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the vision of Idoo the
seer?"[10]....

[Footnote 10: Chronicles II., ix. 29.]

And is not the Song of the Well identical with that brief extract from
the Book of Wars of the Lord--lost to us for ever--which runs:

"Spring up, O well: sing ye unto it: The well, which the princes
digged, Which the nobles of the people delved, With the sceptre ...
with their staves."[11]

[Footnote 11: Numbers xxi. 17.]

Some men say that the People of the Well are one of the lost tribes, but
that is an easy solution which suggests itself to the hasty-minded.
Others say that they are descendants of the Babylonian races, or that
they came down from Egypt when Rameses II died, and there arose a new
dynasty and a Pharaoh who did not know the wise Jewish Prime Minister
who ruled so wisely, who worshipped in the little temple at Karnac, and
whose statue you may see in Cairo with a strange Egyptian name. We know
him better as "Joseph"--he who was sold into captivity.

Whatever they were, this much is known, to the discomfort of everybody,
that they were great diggers of wells, and would, on the slightest
excuse, spend whole months, choosing, for some mad reason, the top of
hills for their operations, delving in the earth for water, though the
river was less than a hundred yards away.

Of all the interesting solutions which have been offered with the object
of identifying the People of the Well, none are so interesting as that
which Bones put forward at the end of Hamilton's brief sketch.

"My idea, dear old officer," he said profoundly, "that all these
Johnnies are artful old niggers who've run away from their wives in
Timbuctoo--and for this reason----"

"Oh, shut up!" said Hamilton.

Two nights later the bugles were ringing through the Houssa lines, and
Bones, sleepy-eyed, with an armful of personal belongings, was racing
for the _Zaire_, for Ogibo of the Akasava had secured a following.

II

The chief Ogibo who held the law and kept the peace for his master, the
King of the Akasava, was bitten many times by the tsetse on a hunting
trip into the bad lands near the Utur forest. Two years afterwards, of a
sudden, he was seized with a sense of his own importance, and proclaimed
himself paramount chief of the Akasava, and all the lands adjoining. And
since it is against nature that any lunatic should