d with everyone I could find worth
talking to, and they were not many, Baas. But there was one very old
woman who was not of the Mazitu race and whose husband and children
were all dead, but whom the people in the town looked up to and feared
because she was wise and made medicines out of herbs, and told fortunes.
I used to go to see her. She was quite blind, Baas, and fond of talking
with me--which shows how wise she was. I told her all about the Pongo
gorilla-god, of which already she knew something. When I had done she
said that he was as nothing compared with a certain god that she
had seen in her youth, seven tens of years ago, when she became
marriageable. I asked her for that story, and she spoke it thus:

"Far away to the north and east live a people called the Kendah, who are
ruled over by a sultan. They are a very great people and inhabit a most
fertile country. But all round their country the land is desolate and
manless, peopled only by game, for the reason that they will suffer none
to dwell there. That is why nobody knows anything about them: he that
comes across the wilderness into that land is killed and never returns
to tell of it.

"She told me also that she was born of this people, but fled because
their sultan wished to place her in his house of women, which she did
not desire. For a long while she wandered southwards, living on roots
and berries, till she came to desert land and at last, worn out, lay
down to die. Then she was found by some of the Mazitu who were on an
expedition seeking ostrich feathers for war-plumes. They gave her food
and, seeing that she was fair, brought her back to their country, where
one of them married her. But of her own land she uttered only lying
words to them because she feared that if she told the truth the gods who
guard its secrets would be avenged on her, though now when she was near
to death she dreaded them no more, since even the Kendah gods cannot
swim through the waters of death. That is all she said about her journey
because she had forgotten the rest."

"Bother her journey, Hans. What did she say about her god and the Kendah
people?"

"This, Baas: that the Kendah have not one god but two, and not one ruler
but two. They have a good god who is a child-fetish" (here I started)
"that speaks through the mouth of an oracle who is always a woman. If
that woman dies the god does not speak until they find another woman
bearing certain marks which show that she h