at I had noticed opening
out of the central cave. This we followed for about five paces, when it
suddenly widened out into a small chamber, about eight feet square, and
hewn out of the living rock. On one side of this chamber was a stone
slab, about three feet from the ground, and running its entire length
like a bunk in a cabin, and on this slab he intimated that I was to
sleep. There was no window or air-hole to the chamber, and no furniture;
and, on looking at it more closely, I came to the disturbing conclusion
(in which, as I afterwards discovered, I was quite right) that it
had originally served for a sepulchre for the dead rather than a
sleeping-place for the living, the slab being designed to receive the
corpse of the departed. The thought made me shudder in spite of myself;
but, seeing that I must sleep somewhere, I got over the feeling as best
I might, and returned to the cavern to get my blanket, which had been
brought up from the boat with the other things. There I met Job, who,
having been inducted to a similar apartment, had flatly declined to stop
in it, saying that the look of the place gave him the horrors, and that
he might as well be dead and buried in his grandfather's brick grave
at once, and expressed his determination of sleeping with me if I would
allow him. This, of course, I was only too glad to do.

The night passed very comfortably on the whole. I say on the whole,
for personally I went through a most horrible nightmare of being buried
alive, induced, no doubt, by the sepulchral nature of my surroundings.
At dawn we were aroused by a loud trumpeting sound, produced, as we
afterwards discovered, by a young Amahagger blowing through a hole
bored in its side into a hollowed elephant tusk, which was kept for the
purpose.

Taking the hint, we got up and went down to the stream to wash, after
which the morning meal was served. At breakfast one of the women, no
longer quite young, advanced and publicly kissed Job. I think it was in
its way the most delightful thing (putting its impropriety aside for
a moment) that I ever saw. Never shall I forget the respectable Job's
abject terror and disgust. Job, like myself, is a bit of a misogynist--I
fancy chiefly owing to the fact of his having been one of a family
of seventeen--and the feelings expressed upon his countenance when
he realised that he was not only being embraced publicly, and without
authorisation on his own part, but also in the presence of