whereon I explained matters to her to the best of my power.
The end of it was that after Indudu and Goza had wiped her down
with tufts of thatch dragged from the hut and I had collected her
gear with the rest of my own, we set her on the horse
straddlewise, and started, the objects of much interest among
such Zulus as were already abroad.

At the gate of the town there was a delay which made me nervous,
since in such a case as mine delay might always mean a
death-warrant. I knew that it was quite possible Cetewayo had
changed, or been persuaded to change his mind and issue a command
that I should be killed as one who had seen and knew too much.
Indeed this fear was my constant companion during all the long
journey to the Drift of the Tugela, causing me to look askance at
every man we met or who overtook us, lest he should prove to be a
messenger of doom.

Nor were these doubts groundless, for as I learned in the after
days, the Prime Minister, Umnyamana, and others had urged
Cetewayo strongly to kill me, and what we were waiting for at the
gate were his final orders on the subject. However, in this
matter, as in more that I could mention, the king played the part
of a man of honour, and although he seemed to hesitate for
reasons of policy, never had any intention of allowing me to be
harmed. On the contrary the command brought was that any one who
harmed Macumazahn, the king's guest and messenger, should die
with all his House.

Whilst we tarried a number of women gathered round us whose
conversation I could not help overhearing. One of them said to
another--

"Look at the white man, Watcher-by-Night, who can knock a fly off
an ox's horn with a bullet from further away than we could see
it. He it was who loved and was loved by the witch Mameena,
whose beauty is still famous in the land. They say she killed
herself for his sake, because she declared that she would never
live to grow old and ugly, so that he turned away from her. My
mother told me all about it only last night."

Then you have a liar for a mother, thought I to myself, for to
contradict such a one openly would have been undignified.

"Is it so?" asked one of her friends, deeply interested. "Then
the lady Mameena must have had a strange taste in men, for this
one is an ugly little fellow with hair like the grey ash of
stubble and a wrinkled face of the colour of a flayed skin that
has lain unstretched in the sun. However, I have been told