ne that boded
ill for Tola and his following.

"Was it to learn the fate of a nation, Great Great One?" answered
Lalusini, or Mahlula, as she was known here. "Learn it then so far.
The end is not yet. But--I see the shook of war. I see men and horses
advancing. The lion-cubs of Zulu flee before them. But lying behind
the hills on either side is a dark cloud of terrible ones. Still they
advance, those whites. Then that cloud whirls down upon them, breaks
over them. Ha! There are death-screams as the flash of the spears
rises and falls, and horses straggling, hoofs in air, and the song of
those black ones is a battle-song of triumph."

Now I saw that the speaker had fallen into one of those divining trances
I knew so well, and in which all she foretold had come to pass.
Dingane, too, began to see this, and asked eagerly, yet not without awe
in his tone:

"And when shall this be, sister?"

"Hearken to no idle counsels. Heed no false magic," she answered, with
meaning. "I, and I alone, can see into the future. Be led by me if
this nation would live."

With these words, I, who looked, saw the vision pass away from
Lalusini's countenance, and her eyes were as those of one who awakens
out of a deep sleep. The King, too, must have seen it, for he forebore
to question her further. Then he spoke, low at first, but raising his
voice in a black and terrible burst of wrath.

"Now of yon impostors I will make an end. Take them away, ye black
ones." And he pointed with his spear at Tola and his following.

At the word of the King, the slayers sprang forward. But the witch
doctors fled howling, and keeping in a compact body, broke through all
who stood in their path, and the lower end of the kraal became full of
the kicking, tumbling bodies of men. But the slayers were among them;
and the people barring their way to the lower gate, they were seized and
dragged, howling and shrieking, without the kraal. And as the
knobkerries fell with a heavy thud upon their cunning and bloodthirsty
brains, a murmur of fierce delight escaped all who heard, for the people
hated these wolves of _izanusi_, and rejoiced that they themselves
should taste the death they loved to deal out to others.

There was one, however, who did not so rejoice, and that was Tambusa;
indeed at first he had made a movement to stay the word, which was that
of doom to the _izanusi_; but the look on the face of Dingane was so
fell and deadly, that e