ng the Umpondwana Suzanne had but two pastimes. One of them was to
carve wood with a knife, and the other to paint pictures upon jars, for
which art she always had a taste, these jars being afterwards burnt in
the fire. For pigments she used certain clays or ochres, red and black
and white and yellow, which were found in abundance on the slopes of
the mountain, and also a kind of ink that she made by boiling down the
kernels of the fruit of the green-leaved tree which grew by the banks of
the river.

Now it was as she gazed at these jars of pigments and the brushes of
goat's hair that the wisdom which she sought came to Sihamba; yes, in a
moment it came to her, in a moment her plan was made, and she knew that
it would not fail. To-morrow at the dawn the Umpondwana, to the number
of several thousands, would pour through the pass on to the plain
beyond. Well, Suzanne should go with them, she should go _as a black
woman!_ Already her hair and eyes were dark, and with those pigments her
snow-white flesh could be darkened also, and then in the crowd who would
know her from a Kaffir girl, she who could talk the language as though
she had been born a Kaffir. Stay! Bull-Head was artful and clever, and
perhaps he might be ready for such a trick. How could she deceive him?

Again she looked at the jars, and again wisdom came to her. It was
the habit of Suzanne to sit in her dizzy chair of rock and watch the
sunrise, hoping ever that in the light of it she might see white men
riding to rescue her, and this Van Vooren knew, for she could be seen
from the mouth of the pass below, where from hour to hour he would stand
gazing at her five hundred feet above his head.

Well, to-morrow at the dawn another white woman should be seated yonder
to satisfy his eyes, or at least a woman who seemed to be white. On the
cliff edge, not far from this very rock lay the body of a poor girl who
that day had died of thirst. If its face and arms and feet were painted
white, and Suzanne's cloak of white goat's hair were set upon its
shoulders, and the corpse itself placed upright in the chair, who,
looking at it from hundreds of feet beneath, could guess that it was not
Suzanne, and who, seeing it set aloft, would seek for Suzanne among the
crowd of escaping Kaffirs? The plan was good; it could scarcely fail,
only time pressed.

"Sister, awake," whispered Sihamba. Suzanne sat up at once, for the
sleep of the doomed is light. "Listen, sister," went o