lpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began:

"It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's
country. It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got into
power--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the Bapedi
people had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the interior,
and so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and came straight away
from Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky thing to
go into the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew that
there were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined
to have a try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so tough
from continual knocking about that I did not set it down at much. Well,
I got on all right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautiful piece of
bush veldt, with great ranges of mountains running through it, and round
granite koppies starting up here and there, looking out like sentinels
over the rolling waste of bush. But it is very hot,--hot as a
stew-pan,--and when I was there that March, which, of course, is autumn
in this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every morning,
as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to creep from the
waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a
long line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton-wool tossed
up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among the
scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds
of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons of
rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the
beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great
word across the surface of the country, and that word was 'fever.'

"It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one
little kraal of knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some
_maas_ (curdled butter-milk) and a few mealies. As I got near I was
struck with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and
no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place,
though it had evidently been recently inhabited, was as still as the
bush round it, and some guinea-fowl got up out of the prickly pear
bushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little
before going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot.
Nature never looks d