Great One,
practises _mutt_. What offence can be greater than such?"

The victims, their countenances set and stony with fear, were now seized
and held by many a pair of powerful and willing hands. Then, with the
blade of a great assegai, their ears were deliberately shorn from their
heads. A roar of delight went up from the barbarous spectators, who
shouted lustily in praise of the King.

"So said the Great Great One: `They had ears, but their ears heard what
it was not lawful they should hear, so they must hear no more!' Is he
not wise? _Au_! the wisdom of the calf of Matyobane!"

Again the executioners closed around their victims. A moment more and
they parted. They were holding up to the crowd their victims' eyes.
The roars of delight rose in redoubled volume.

"So said the Black One: `They had eyes, but they saw what it was not
lawful for them to look upon. So they must see no more!' _Au_! the
greatness of the Elephant whose tread shaketh the world!"

There was a tigerish note in the utterance of this horrible paean which
might well have made the white spectators shudder. Whatever they felt,
however, they must show nothing.

"I shall be deadly sick directly," muttered Blachland; and all wondered
what horror was yet to come.

The two blinded and mutilated wretches were writhing and moaning, and
begging piteously for the boon of death to end their terrible
sufferings. But their fiendish tormentors were engaged in far too
congenial a task to be in any undue hurry to end it. It is only fair to
record that to the victims themselves it would have been equally
congenial were the positions reversed. At last, however, the
executioners again stepped forward.

"So said the Ruler of Nations," they bellowed, their short-handled heavy
knob sticks held aloft: "These two had the power of thought. They used
that power to pry into what it is not lawful for them even to think
about. A man without brains cannot think. Let them therefore think no
more."

And with these two last words of the King's sentence--terse, remorseless
in the simplicity of its barbarous logic--the heavy knob sticks swept
down with a horrid crunch as of the pulverising of bones. Another and
another. The sufferings of the miserable wretches were over at last.
Their death struggles had ceased, and they lay stark and motionless,
their skulls literally battered to pieces.

Not the most hardened and philosophical of the white spectators c