gether with an assegai to protect himself with on his journey
to a better world. On the third day we marched again, hoping that we
might live to return to dig up our buried ivory, and in due course,
after a long and wearisome tramp, and many adventures which I have not
space to detail, we reached Sitanda's Kraal, near the Lukanga River,
the real starting-point of our expedition. Very well do I recollect our
arrival at that place. To the right was a scattered native settlement
with a few stone cattle kraals and some cultivated lands down by the
water, where these savages grew their scanty supply of grain, and
beyond it stretched great tracts of waving "veld" covered with tall
grass, over which herds of the smaller game were wandering. To the left
lay the vast desert. This spot appears to be the outpost of the fertile
country, and it would be difficult to say to what natural causes such
an abrupt change in the character of the soil is due. But so it is.

Just below our encampment flowed a little stream, on the farther side
of which is a stony slope, the same down which, twenty years before, I
had seen poor Silvestre creeping back after his attempt to reach
Solomon's Mines, and beyond that slope begins the waterless desert,
covered with a species of karoo shrub.

It was evening when we pitched our camp, and the great ball of the sun
was sinking into the desert, sending glorious rays of many-coloured
light flying all over its vast expanse. Leaving Good to superintend the
arrangement of our little camp, I took Sir Henry with me, and walking
to the top of the slope opposite, we gazed across the desert. The air
was very clear, and far, far away I could distinguish the faint blue
outlines, here and there capped with white, of the Suliman Berg.

"There," I said, "there is the wall round Solomon's Mines, but God
knows if we shall ever climb it."

"My brother should be there, and if he is, I shall reach him somehow,"
said Sir Henry, in that tone of quiet confidence which marked the man.

"I hope so," I answered, and turned to go back to the camp, when I saw
that we were not alone. Behind us, also gazing earnestly towards the
far-off mountains, stood the great Kafir Umbopa.

The Zulu spoke when he saw that I had observed him, addressing Sir
Henry, to whom he had attached himself.

"Is it to that land that thou wouldst journey, Incubu?" (a native word
meaning, I believe, an elephant, and the name given to Sir Henry by the
Kaf