-he!_" they assented. Then they fell to talking of other things, and
soon the concealed listener heard them rise up and depart.

Laurence decided to wait no more for his companions. He wanted to be
alone and think this matter out. So when the voices of the talkers had
fairly faded beyond earshot he left the cluster of trees on the farther
side and took his way down the mountain slope.

A ghastly fear was upon him. The horror and mystery of the thing got
upon even his iron nerves--the suddenness of it too, just when he had
lulled himself into a complete sense of security. Had he learned in like
fashion that he was to be slain in an ordinary way at a given time it
would not have shaken him beyond the ordinary. But this thing--there was
something so devilish about it. What did it mean? Was it some grotesque
idol worked by mechanism, even as in the old pagan temples--to which
human sacrifices were offered? Or--for he could not candidly discredit
all the weird and marvellous tales and traditions of some of these
up-country tribes, degraded and man-eating as they were--was it some
unknown and terrifying monster inhabiting the dens and caves of the
earth? Whatever it was, he knew too well, of course, that the
coincidence which had so miraculously resulted in the sparing of his
life at the hands of the victorious Ba-gcatya, reeking with slaughter,
would stand him in nowhere here. He remembered the mystery hanging over
the fate of Lutali, and those horrible beings who had hauled the Arab to
his doom, whatever it was, who indeed might well constitute the
priesthood of the unknown devil-god.

Surely never indeed had earth presented a fairer scene than this upon
which the adventurer's eyes rested, as he made his way down the
mountain-side. The calm, peaceful beauty of the day, the golden sunlight
flooding the plain beneath, the great circle of Imvungayo, and the--by
contrast--tiny circles of lesser kraals scattered about the valley or
crowning some mountain spur, and, mellow upon the stillness, the distant
low of cattle--the singing of women at work mingling with the soft
voices of a multitude of doves in cornlands and the surrounding
forest-trees. Yet now in the white peaks towering to the cloudless
heavens, in the black and craggy rifts, in the wide, rolling,
partially-wooded plains--the hunter's paradise--this man saw only a
gloomy wizard circle, inclosing some horrible inferno, the throne of the
frightful demon-god of this ex