ch played with
well-nigh unintermittent incandescence athwart the storm cloud beyond.
There he stood, his features working horribly, the tangled masses of his
beard and hair floating in the fitful gusts which came whistling up from
the dizzy height. Never, to their dying day, would the spectators
forget the sight. Yet they could do nothing.

With a choking cackle, like an attempt at a laugh, the maniac turned
again to the awful height. The spectators held their breaths and their
blood ran cold. Then they saw him gather his legs beneath him and
spring far out into space.

Petrified with horror, they rushed to the brink and peered over. The
smooth rock face fell without a break down to the tree-tops at a dizzy
depth beneath. These were still quivering faintly as though recently
disturbed. But at that moment heaven's artillery roared in one vast
deafening, crackling roll. The air was ablaze with vivid blue flame,
and driven before the tornado blast, sheet upon sheet of deluging rain
crashed down upon them, beating them to the earth by the very weight and
fury of its volume.

CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT.

ENVOI.

Ring we the curtain down--for our tale is ended and we have no desire to
point a moral thereto. Years have gone by, and new homesteads have
risen upon the ashes of the old ones; and flocks and herds are once more
grazing in security upon those grassy plains, those pleasant plains, so
sunny, so peaceful, so smiling.

And how the broken and decimated tribes were settled on new locations,
and how the ringleaders and prominent fighting men of those who owned
British allegiance were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, and how
the Gaika location was parcelled out into farms, and as such leased by
the Department of Crown Lands to white settlers; and how in
consideration of certain acts of forbearance and humanity exercised
during the period of hostilities and resulting in the saving of several
European lives, the sentences of imprisonment passed upon Nteya and
Ncanduku were remitted--mainly through the exertions of Eustace Milne--
and the two sub-chiefs were allowed to rejoin the banished remnant of
their tribe in its new location beyond the Kei--are not all these things
matters of history?

And how the sad relics of poor Tom Carhayes, his fate now under no sort
of doubt, were gathered together beneath the great _krantz_ in the Bashi
valley on the morning after his insane and fatal leap, and conveyed to