sculptor by trade, that had fashioned the figure on the cross in this
chapel out of that of the heathen goddess which had stood in the same
place from unknown antiquity. It ended with a request, addressed to all
good Christians in Latin, that they who soon must be as he was would
pray for his soul and not disturb his bones, which rested here in the
hope of a blessed resurrection.

When this pious wish was translated to Jacob Meyer by Mr. Clifford, who
still retained some recollection of the classics which he had painfully
acquired at Eton and Oxford, the Jew could scarcely contain his wrath.
Indeed, looking at his bleeding hands, instead of praying for the soul
of that excellent missionary, to reach whose remains he had laboured
with such arduous, incessant toil, he cursed it wherever it might be,
and unceremoniously swept the bones, which the document asked him not to
disturb, into a corner of the tomb, in order to ascertain whether there
was not, perhaps, some stair beneath them.

"Really, Mr. Meyer," said Benita, who, in spite of the solemnity of the
surroundings, could not control her sense of humour, "if you are not
careful the ghosts of all these people will haunt you."

"Let them haunt me if they can," he answered furiously. "I don't believe
in ghosts, and defy them all."

At this moment, looking up, Benita saw a figure gliding out of the
darkness into the ring of light, so silently that she started, for it
might well have been one of those ghosts in whom Jacob Meyer did not
believe. In fact, however, it was the old Molimo, who had a habit of
coming upon them thus.

"What says the white man?" he asked of Benita, while his dreamy eyes
wandered over the three of them, and the hole in the violated tomb.

"He says that he does not believe in spirits, and that he defies them,"
she answered.

"The white gold-seeker does not believe in spirits, and he defies them,"
Mambo repeated in his sing-song voice. "He does not believe in the
spirits that I see all around me now, the angry spirits of the dead,
who speak together of where he shall lie and of what shall happen to
him when he is dead, and of how they will welcome one who disturbs their
rest and defies and curses them in his search for the riches which he
loves. There is one standing by him now, dressed in a brown robe with a
dead man cut in ivory like to that," and he pointed to the crucifix in
Jacob's hands, "and he holds the ivory man above him and threatens