neath the eyes.

Here Nyleptha began to cry, and Sir Henry again turned the subject,
telling me that the artists had taken a cast of the dead body
of old Umslopogaas, and that a great statue in black marble was
to be erected of him in the act of splitting the sacred stone,
which was to be matched by another statue in white marble of
myself and the horse Daylight as he appeared when, at the termination
of that wild ride, he sank beneath me in the courtyard of the
palace. I have since seen these statues, which at the time of
writing this, six months after the battle, are nearly finished;
and very beautiful they are, especially that of Umslopogaas,
which is exactly like him. As for that of myself, it is good,
but they have idealized my ugly face a little, which is perhaps
as well, seeing that thousands of people will probably look at
it in the centuries to come, and it is not pleasant to look at
ugly things.

Then they told me that Umslopogaas' last wish had been carried
out, and that, instead of being cremated, as I shall be, after
the usual custom here, he had been tied up, Zulu fashion, with
his knees beneath his chin, and, having been wrapped in a thin
sheet of beaten gold, entombed in a hole hollowed out of the
masonry of the semicircular space at the top of the stair he
defended so splendidly, which faces, as far as we can judge,
almost exactly towards Zululand. There he sits, and will sit
for ever, for they embalmed him with spices, and put him in an
air-tight stone coffer, keeping his grim watch beneath the spot
he held alone against a multitude; and the people say that at
night his ghost rises and stands shaking the phantom of Inkosi-kaas
at phantom foes. Certainly they fear during the dark hours to
pass the place where the hero is buried.

Oddly enough, too, a new legend or prophecy has arisen in the
land in that unaccountable way in which such things to arise
among barbarous and semi-civilized people, blowing, like the
wind, no man knows whence. According to this saying, so long
as the old Zulu sits there, looking down the stairway he defended
when alive, so long will the New House of the Stairway, springing
from the union of the Englishman and Nyleptha, endure and flourish;
but when he is taken from thence, or when, ages after, his bones
at last crumble into dust, the House will fall, and the Stairway
shall fall, and the Nation of the Zu-Vendi shall cease to be
a Nation.

CHAPTER XXIII
I HAV