mposing about the place; no
towering cliffs or pillars of piled granite, as at the Black
Kloof. It is just a vale cut out by water, bordered by steep
slopes on either side, and a still steeper slope strown with
large rocks at its end. Dotted here and there on these slopes
grew tall aloes that from a little distance looked like scattered
men, whereof the lower leaves were shrivelled and blackened by
veld fires. Also there were a few euphorbias, grey,
naked-looking things that end in points like fingers on a hand,
and among them some sparse thorn trees, struggling to live in an
inhospitable soil.

The place has one peculiarity. Jutting into it from the hillside
is a ridge or spur, sixty or seventy yards in length by perhaps
twenty broad, that ends in a flat point of rock which stands
about forty feet above the level of the rest of the little
valley. On this ridge also grew tall aloes until near its
extremity the soil ceased, or had been washed away from the
water-worn core of rock.

It was, and no doubt still is, a desolate-looking spot, at any
rate for most of the day when owing to the shadow of the
surrounding hills, it receives but little sun. Everything about
it, especially when I was there in a time of rain, seemed dank
and miserable, although the flat floor of the kloof was clothed
with a growth of tall, coarse grass, and weeds that bore an
evil-smelling flower. Perhaps some sense of appropriateness had
caused the Zulu kings to choose this lonesome, deathly-looking
gorge as one of their execution grounds. At any rate many had
been slain here, for skulls and the larger human bones, some of
them black with age, lay all about among the grass, as they had
been scattered by hyenas and jackals. They were particularly
thick beneath and around the table-like rock that I have
mentioned.

Goza told me that this was because the King's Slayers made a
custom of dragging the victim along the projecting tongue to the
edge of this rock and hurling him, either dead or living, to the
ground beneath; or, in the case of witches; driving them over
after they had been blinded.

Such was the spot that Zikali had selected to abide in during his
visit to Ulundi. Certainly where privacy was an object it was
well chosen, for, as Cetewayo had said and as Goza emphasized to
me, it had the repute of being the most thoroughly haunted place
in all Zululand, with the sole exception, perhaps, of the ridge
opposite to Dingaan's old