amounted to a valley. As we approached it I noticed its
peculiar and blasted appearance, for whereas all around the grass was
vivid with the green of spring, on this place none seemed to grow. An
eminence strewn with tumbled heaps of blackish rock, and among them a
few struggling, dark-leaved bushes; that was its appearance. Moreover,
many of these boulders looked as though they had been splashed and lined
with whitewash, showing that they were the resting-place of hundreds of
gorged vultures.

I believe it is the Chinese who declare that particular localities have
good or evil influences attached to them, some kind of spirit of their
own, and really Hloma Amabutu and a few other spots that I am acquainted
with in Africa give colour to the fancy. Certainly as I set foot upon
that accursed ground, that Golgotha, that Place of Skulls, a shiver went
through me. It may have been caused by the atmosphere, moral and actual,
of the mount, or it may have been a prescience of a certain dreadful
scene which within a few months I was doomed to witness there. Or
perhaps the place itself and the knowledge of the trial before me sent
a sudden chill through my healthy blood. I cannot say which it was, but
the fact remains as I have stated, although a minute or two later, when
I saw what kind of sleepers lay upon that mount, it would not have been
necessary for me to seek any far-fetched explanation of my fear.

Across this hill, winding in and out between the rough rocks that lay
here, there and everywhere like hailstones after a winter storm, ran
sundry paths. It seems that the shortest road to various places in the
neighbourhood of the Great Kraal ran over it, and although no Zulu ever
dared to set foot there between sun-set and rise, in the daytime they
used these paths freely enough. But I suppose that they also held
that this evil-omened field of death had some spirit of its own, some
invisible but imminent fiend, who needed to be propitiated, lest soon he
should claim them also.

This was their method of propitiation, a common one enough, I believe,
in many lands, though what may be its meaning I cannot tell. As the
traveller came to those spots where the paths cut across each other, he
took a stone and threw it on to a heap that had been accumulated there
by the hands of other travellers. There were many such heaps upon the
hill, over a dozen, I think, and the size of them was great. I should
say that the biggest contained q