nto a grassy open space of perhaps thirty paces wide, and I saw at once
the old fellow sitting at the door of his hut beneath the shade of a
wild vine which grew luxuriantly over the porch and roof. I was too much
occupied in greeting him to take note at once of the building, but when
we were seated, and he had been thawed out of his first coolness, I
looked more closely at it. It interested me. It was long in shape, much
longer than the usual native hut, and with three windows narrow and
pointed, one of them now roughly blocked with sods. I examined the
stones of the walls, getting up to do so. They struck me as being old
and much more carefully laid than is usual in native work.

"'Did you build this house yourself, old man?' I asked. 'It is well
made.'

"'I did not build it,' he said. 'I found it here. When I came to
Mtakatifuni, it was empty and had been empty for long. There was no roof
to it in those days, and few came near the place. But that suited me.
My mind was full of him whom I had seen, and my spirit told me that
I should await him here. The father of the chief then gave it me, no
councillor knowing aught about it.'

"'And you planted this vine and cleared this space, perhaps?'

"'I did not. I did but train the vine which had blocked the door, and
cut down for the wood of the roof the young trees that had grown here.
But some other had cleared the ground before me.'

"'Would you mind if I looked within, Mwezi?' I questioned, for to tell
you the truth my curiosity was thoroughly aroused.

"The old fellow got up courteously. 'Enter, white man,' said he. 'My
sons shall bring the stools and fetch us beer. I am old and poor, but
you are welcome. You are at least of the people of him I saw, and shall
I, in my sorrow, forbid you to come in?'

"We entered. The place was divided into two by a sod partition, plainly
recent in construction, and I looked disappointedly at what I could see.
There were the usual scant furnishings of a native hut--a _kitanda_,
some pots, a stool or two, a few spears in a corner. But when I passed
round the partition, my interest increased tenfold. I even cried out in
my astonishment.

"I saw what I had not been able to see from the fact of my approach
from the west of the clearing. The eastern end of the hut was not built
squarely as the other, but roughly rounded in what elsewhere I should
unhesitatingly have called an apse, and since on either side there were
still visible a c