e writing
speaks. Never shall thine eyes witness such another sight."

[*] The name of the race Ama-hagger would seem to indicate a
curious mingling of races such as might easily have occurred
in the neighbourhood of the Zambesi. The prefix "Ama" is
common to the Zulu and kindred races, and signifies
"people," while "hagger" is an Arabic word meaning a stone.
--Editor.

Accordingly I followed her to a side passage opening out of the main
cave, then down a great number of steps, and along an underground shaft
which cannot have been less than sixty feet beneath the surface of the
rock, and was ventilated by curious borings that ran upward, I know not
where. Suddenly the passage ended, and she halted and bade the mutes
hold up the lamps, and, as she had prophesied, I saw a scene such as
I was not likely to see again. We were standing in an enormous pit, or
rather on the brink of it, for it went down deeper--I do not know how
much--than the level on which we stood, and was edged in with a low wall
of rock. So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the
space beneath the dome of St. Paul's in London, and when the lamps were
held up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being
literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an
enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies
at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above. Anything more
appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I
cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this
dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated
with the skin still on them, and now, fixed in every conceivable
position, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquely
horrible caricatures of humanity. In my astonishment I uttered an
ejaculation, and the echoes of my voice, ringing in the vaulted space,
disturbed a skull that had been accurately balanced for many thousands
of years near the apex of the pile. Down it came with a run, bounding
along merrily towards us, and of course bringing an avalanche of other
bones after it, till at last the whole pit rattled with their movement,
even as though the skeletons were getting up to greet us.

"Come," I said, "I have seen enough. These are the bodies of those who
died of the great sickness, is it not so?" I added, as we turned away.

"Yea. The people of Kor ever em