and hair until they
glistened.

"Well, I'm sugared!" said Compton.

"Fat very good for the skin," said Muata, showing his teeth. "You
try."

"Better for the guns, chief.''

"Wow! and for the big knife;" and the chief polished up his Ghoorka
blade, while the boys greased the rifles and stared at the chief's
wife, thinking, as they stared, of the adventures which she had been
through since she fled from the kraal of her husband, driven out by
the slave-hunters. They had seen old black women at the villages,
wrinkled old crones, phenomenally thin; but this woman was not much
wrinkled, and she was not thin. Neither was she ugly as those others
had been, for she carried herself straight, and there was a dignity
about her actions whenever she moved her long bare arms. But they
came to the conclusion that she was not a person to sew on buttons,
for there was a hard look about the eyes, and the whole cast of the
face was set and stem. It did not seem possible that she could
smile, and, remembering the careless laughter of native women, who
were amused at anything or nothing, she was a mystery to them. So
they very soon gave up trying to make anything out of her, and
turned their attention to the lagoon, which stretched away a good
ten miles on either hand to the dark fringe of forest. Evidently the
forest had grown where the shallow waters now were, as the dead
trees testified.

"The land has sunk about here," said Venning, "and underneath there
must be a coal-bed in process of formation. Now, if there were hills
around, and a nice clean sand-beach, I should like to spend months
here."

"Too many mosquitoes!"

"Besides," said Mr. Hume, striking in, "there are hills."

"Where? Over there? Why, that's a cloud!"

"Perhaps so; but the cloud rests on a hill-top. Isn't that so,
Muata?"

"Those be the gates to the Place of Rest."

"By Jimminy! How far?" This was something to be excited about.

Muata held up five fingers. "So many suns will rise and set."

"And does the forest lie in between?"

"Between and beyond."

"And the Place of Rest, is that forest also?"

"The sun shines there all day," said the chief; "and a man can see
his shadow lengthen. The little ones play on the white sand, the
women and the girls work in the gardens on the open slopes of the
hills, and the men----"

"Well, what about the men?"

"They lie in the sand like lizards, and talk like parrots."

It was the chief's wife who spoke sco