th to modesty,
replied emphatically that this was the case.

"Because of that fight and that leap," Ayesha went on, "as for other
deeds that you have done and will do, my Spirit tells me that your name
will live in story for many generations. Yet of what use is fame to the
dead? Therefore I make you an offer. Bide here with me and you shall
rule these Amahagger, and with them the remnant of the People of Rezu.
Your cattle shall be countless and your wives the fairest in the land,
and your children many, for I will lift a certain curse from off you
so that no more shall you be childless. Do you accept, O Holder of the
Axe?"

When he understood, Umslopogaas, after pondering a moment, asked if I
meant to stay in this land and marry the white chieftainess who spoke
such wise words and could appear and disappear in the battle at her
will, and like a mountain-top hid her head in a cloud, which was his way
of alluding to her veil.

I answered at once and with decision that I intended to do nothing of
the sort and immediately regretted my words, since, although I spoke
in Zulu, I suppose she read their meaning from my face. At any rate she
understood the drift of them.

"Tell him, Allan," she said with a kind of icy politeness, "that you
will not stop here and marry me, because if ever I chose a husband he
would not be a little man at the doors of whose heart so many women's
hands have knocked--yes, even those that are black--and not, I think, in
vain. One, moreover, who holds himself so clever that he believes he
has nothing left to learn, and in every flower of truth that is shown to
him, however fair, smells only poison, and beneath, nurturing it, sees
only the gross root of falsehood planted in corruption. Tell him these
things, Allan, if it pleases you."

"It does not please me," I answered in a rage at her insults.

"Nor is it needful, Allan, since if I caught the meaning of that
barbarous tongue you use aright, you have told him already. Well, let
the jest pass, O man who least of all things desires to be Ayesha's
husband, and whom Ayesha least of all things desires as her spouse, and
ask the Axe-bearer nothing since I perceive that without you he will
not stay at Kor. Nor indeed is it fated that he should do so, for now
my Spirit tells me what it hid from me when I spoke a moment gone, that
this warrior shall die in a great fight far away and that between then
and now much sorrow waits him who save that of one, k