as convulsed with
inward laughter as I watched him struggling with that stubbly beard. It
seemed so very odd that a man should take the trouble to shave himself
with a piece of fat in such a place and in our circumstances. At last
he succeeded in getting the hair off the right side of his face and
chin, when suddenly I, who was watching, became conscious of a flash of
light that passed just by his head.

Good sprang up with a profane exclamation (if it had not been a safety
razor he would certainly have cut his throat), and so did I, without
the exclamation, and this was what I saw. Standing not more than twenty
paces from where I was, and ten from Good, were a group of men. They
were very tall and copper-coloured, and some of them wore great plumes
of black feathers and short cloaks of leopard skins; this was all I
noticed at the moment. In front of them stood a youth of about
seventeen, his hand still raised and his body bent forward in the
attitude of a Grecian statue of a spear-thrower. Evidently the flash of
light had been caused by a weapon which he had hurled.

As I looked an old soldier-like man stepped forward out of the group,
and catching the youth by the arm said something to him. Then they
advanced upon us.

Sir Henry, Good, and Umbopa by this time had seized their rifles and
lifted them threateningly. The party of natives still came on. It
struck me that they could not know what rifles were, or they would not
have treated them with such contempt.

"Put down your guns!" I halloed to the others, seeing that our only
chance of safety lay in conciliation. They obeyed, and walking to the
front I addressed the elderly man who had checked the youth.

"Greeting," I said in Zulu, not knowing what language to use. To my
surprise I was understood.

"Greeting," answered the old man, not, indeed, in the same tongue, but
in a dialect so closely allied to it that neither Umbopa nor myself had
any difficulty in understanding him. Indeed, as we afterwards found
out, the language spoken by this people is an old-fashioned form of the
Zulu tongue, bearing about the same relationship to it that the English
of Chaucer does to the English of the nineteenth century.

"Whence come you?" he went on, "who are you? and why are the faces of
three of you white, and the face of the fourth as the face of our
mother's sons?" and he pointed to Umbopa. I looked at Umbopa as he said
it, and it flashed across me that he was right. The