nd rose a little and was built up
too before his group of huts, terraced roughly and faced with stone,
with steps at one end. A big block of stone stood near the edge of it,
so that standing behind one looked east over the town to the mountains,
and it was there, after a little, that I offered the Holy Sacrifice each
remaining day of my stay. There was little linen in the place, and he
stood to greet me at the top of the steps, clad in prepared skins, a
youngish man and a fine figure of a savage king. He gave me later the
twisted iron spear of state that he carried that day. It hangs in our
church of the Holy Cross now, behind the altar of the Sacred Heart.
Surely the Good God will not forget Mtakatifuni.

"Well, he greeted me courteously, with reserve, but with a suggestion
of curious eagerness. I marked it at once. Not, however, till the usual
questions as to my journeys and so on were over, did I get a clue to the
cause of it. But then, when we were seated on stools by the great stone
I have mentioned, big clay beakers of thin, delicious light beer beside
us, he put a question. 'Why have you been so long a time coming, my
father?' he asked. 'A little later and you would have been too late.'

"I was slightly puzzled, but I supposed he referred to the length of my
journey. 'The way was long and rough, chief,' said I.

"'But why were you so long in setting out?' he persisted. 'Mwezi has
been expecting you for many years.' He turned to an old councillor. 'How
many years has Mwezi been expecting the father?'

"'Since the days of the Great One, the father of the King,' said the old
man. 'Mwezi came first among us when I was a boy.'

"Now most of this was Greek to me, but the speaker was fifty if he was a
day, whatever allowance was to be made for the early ageing of Africans,
and you may imagine that I understood enough to be surprised. 'How
could that be, chief?' I asked. 'When this old man was a boy, I had not
crossed the black water to come to this land, and possibly I had not
been born. Truly of this Mwezi I knew nothing, but how could he expect
me whom even my mother had not seen?'

"The chief looked worried, and stared at me for awhile in silence. Then
he nodded thoughtfully. 'It is true,' he said. 'The father is doubtless
wise and has seen years, but his beard is not white and the thing is
strange. Nevertheless he wears the black robe and the dried beans, and
he carries the book in his hand, even as Mwezi has s