yond. I cut the strings that
tied them to the world. They fell off. Ha! ha! They fell off! Perhaps
they are falling still, perhaps they creep about their desolate kraals
in the skins of snakes. I wish I knew the snakes that I might crush them
with my heel. Yonder, beneath us, at the burying place of kings, there
is a hole. In that hole lies the bones of Chaka, the king who died for
Baleka. Far away in Zululand there is a cleft upon the Ghost Mountain.
At the foot of that cleft lie the bones of Dingaan, the king who died
for Nada. It was far to fall and he was heavy; those bones of his are
broken into little pieces. I went to see them when the vultures and the
jackals had done their work. And then I laughed three times and came
here to die.

All that is long ago, and I have not died; though I wish to die and
follow the road that Nada trod. Perhaps I have lived to tell you this
tale, my father, that you may repeat it to the white men if you will.
How old am I? Nay, I do not know. Very, very old. Had Chaka lived he
would have been as old as I. (2) None are living whom I knew when I was
a boy. I am so old that I must hasten. The grass withers, and the winter
comes. Yes, while I speak the winter nips my heart. Well, I am ready to
sleep in the cold, and perhaps I shall awake again in the spring.

(2) This would have made him nearly a hundred years old, an age rarely
attained by a native. The writer remembers talking to an aged Zulu
woman, however, who told him that she was married when Chaka was
king.--ED.

Before the Zulus were a people--for I will begin at the beginning--I was
born of the Langeni tribe. We were not a large tribe; afterwards, all
our able-bodied men numbered one full regiment in Chaka's army, perhaps
there were between two and three thousand of them, but they were brave.
Now they are all dead, and their women and children with them,--that
people is no more. It is gone like last month's moon; how it went I will
tell you by-and-bye.

Our tribe lived in a beautiful open country; the Boers, whom we call the
Amaboona, are there now, they tell me. My father, Makedama, was chief of
the tribe, and his kraal was built on the crest of a hill, but I was not
the son of his head wife. One evening, when I was still little, standing
as high as a man's elbow only, I went out with my mother below the
cattle kraal to see the cows driven in. My mother was very fond of these
cows, and there was one with a white