within twenty miles of
Blaauwildebeestefontein and I find you, I will give you up.'

He groaned and writhed at my terms, but in the end accepted them. He
wrote the letter, and I posted it. I had no pity for the old scamp,
who had feathered his nest well. Small wonder that the firm's business
was not as good as it might be, when Japp was giving most of his time
to buying diamonds from native thieves. The secret put him in the
power of any Kaffir who traded him a stone. No wonder he cringed to
ruffians like 'Mwanga.

The second thing I did was to shift my quarters. Mr Wardlaw had a
spare room which he had offered me before, and now I accepted it. I
wanted to be no more mixed up with Japp than I could help, for I did
not know what villainy he might let me in for. Moreover, I carried
Zeeta with me, being ashamed to leave her at the mercy of the old
bully. Japp went up to the huts and hired a slattern to mind his
house, and then drank heavily for three days to console himself.

That night I sat smoking with Mr Wardlaw in his sitting-room, where a
welcome fire burned, for the nights on the Berg were chilly. I
remember the occasion well for the queer turn the conversation took.
Wardlaw, as I have said, had been working like a slave at the Kaffir
tongues. I talked a kind of Zulu well enough to make myself
understood, and I could follow it when spoken; but he had real
scholarship in the thing, and knew all about the grammar and the
different dialects. Further, he had read a lot about native history,
and was full of the doings of Tchaka and Mosilikatse and Moshesh, and
the kings of old. Having little to do in the way of teaching, he had
made up for it by reading omnivorously. He used to borrow books from
the missionaries, and he must have spent half his salary in buying new
ones.

To-night as he sat and puffed in his armchair, he was full of stories
about a fellow called Monomotapa. It seems he was a great black
emperor whom the Portuguese discovered about the sixteenth century. He
lived to the north in Mashonaland, and had a mountain full of gold.
The Portuguese did not make much of him, but they got his son and
turned him into a priest.

I told Wardlaw that he was most likely only a petty chief, whose
exploits were magnified by distance, the same as the caciques in
Mexico. But the schoolmaster would not accept this.

'He must have been a big man, Davie. You know that the old ruins in
Rhodesia, called Z