n and yellow, came to eye them furtively through the
chinks of the corrugated iron, and the horses snorted and stamped in
their pickets, as the night breeze carried to them their scent.

Time passed, and the shrill voices of the women-folk ceased, the deep
mutter of the men died gradually down, the lights faded, the scene was
lit up only here and there by the sudden glow of a fire kicked into
blaze by a sentry, but the song of the mosquitoes never ceased.

Then arose and uprose the strange, uncanny voices of the night, which,
taken together, made up a background to the great silence which they
seemed to accentuate. And the king's son bounded again. They were to
him as a mighty call, those voices, from his own land--the land of the
wilderness.

The rumbling thunder of his father's rage, breathing of death and
destruction, had ceased now; but there were plenty more sounds, and the
king's son, listening, knew them all. The distant "Qua-ha-ha!" of a
troop of zebras going to drink; the peculiar snort of an impala
antelope, scenting danger; the far-away drumming of hoofs of a startled
herd of hartebeests; the bleat of an eland calf, pulled down by who
knows what; the "Hoot-toot!" of a hippopotamus, going out to grass; the
sudden shrill "Ya-ya-ya-ya!" of a black-backed jackal close at hand;
the yarly, snarly whines of a hunting leopard; the snap of a
crocodile's jaws, somewhere down in the nearby river; and, last, but by
no means least in ghostliness, the awful rising "Who-oo!" followed by a
sudden mad chorus of maniacal laughter, which told that somewhere a
gathering of hyenas were--at their work!

The king's son was moving about the prison now, examining what he could
see--especially of the walls--with his wonderful, proud eyes, and what
he could not with whiskers and nose. He made no sound, of course--not
so much as a whisper; and when his sister joined him, they were simply
intangible, half-guessed shapes, drifting--there is no other word for
it--through the gloom.

A man, even a colored one, might look long into that inclosure and,
unless he caught the sudden smolder at the back of their eyes, never
tell where they were. Indeed, the inclosure was in pitch-darkness
itself, by reason of its high "tin" walls; and even when a weird yellow
moon came and hung itself up to add to the general uncanniness of the
scene, the prison of the king's son showed only like a well of ink.

Suddenly the silence and the voices of t