old, and hollowed strongholds out of the mountains, and
worshipped strange bird-beaked gods, and passed away. Yet again, when
these ceased to be, there had been War; and this time the black men of the
soil fought with white strangers, who wanted the same things--slaves, and
skins, and ivory, and the yellow metal of the river-sands and of the
rocks.

Now white men fought with white. The black men owned little of the
country: they hid in the kloofs and thickets in terror, while the European
conquerors shed each other's blood for gold, and land, and power. The
boulder was so very old. It could afford to wait patiently until these
men, like all that went before, had passed.

Every seventh day the guns ceased bellowing and throwing iron things that
burst and scattered Death broadcast, and the rifles stopped
crack-cracking and spitting steel and lead. Then the scared birds came
back: the waxbills, and love-birds, and finches, and sparrows darted in
and out among the bushes, and the partridge, and quail, and francolin
ventured down to drink. The old baboon had retired to the hills with his
family; the springbok and the wart-hog had moved up Bulawayo way; the
cheetah and the lynx had followed them....

But as long as human lovers came and whispered to each other, standing
beside the big boulder, or sitting in its shadow, the boulder would be
content. They spoke the old language that it had learned when the world
was comparatively young. Black or yellow or white, African or Oriental or
European, this speech of theirs was always the same; their looks and
actions never varied. Either they met and kissed and were happy, or they
met and quarrelled and were miserable. When no more lovers should come,
the boulder knew that would be the end of the world.

There was a gaudily dressed, white-faced young woman waiting now beside
the big stone upon this seventh day. Her blue eyes were large and wistful.
She had taken off her big flaunting hat and hung it on a bush, and her
face was not unpretty, topped by its aureole of frizzy yellow curls. She
leaned against the sun-warmed granite, and cried a little. That was the
way of women when the man was late at the tryst. Then she dried her eyes
and hummed a song, and, finally, taking a stump of pencil from her pocket,
she began to scribble on the smooth red stone--all part of the old play,
the boulder knew. The first woman whom he remembered had drawn a figure
meant for a portrait o