the smiths were beating into
spear blades the lumps of iron smelted in rude furnaces from
ferriferous quartz. It was an hereditary art. Who had taught it to
them? Perhaps the hook-nosed voyagers from the Phoenician coast, who
had bequeathed to them also a nebulous religious awe of fire, of the
sun, and also of the moon, personified in legend by a pale, ardent,
supernatural woman of surpassing beauty.

In their low verandas the warriors reclined at full length, their
bangles of copper jingling as they reached out their hands toward the
calabashes full of palm wine, or the smoking gourds charged with hemp.
At the gate of the king's stockade the guards sat with their stabbing
spears across their knees, surrounded by wolflike dogs and naked
children with distended abdomens.

It was in the royal enclosure that Lawrence Teck had endured his
captivity.

Beside him, waking and sleeping, there remained two guards, so that in
Muene-Motapa's capital there was a lucid riddle, "What is it that casts
three shadows?" Those two prehistoric warriors were aware of an
incomprehensible great value locked up in the captive's mind; yet at
his first false movement they would have slaughtered him, destroying
cheerfully, like many others before them, what they could never hope to
understand. However, they were kind to him, holding palm leaves over
his head when he crossed the courtyards in the blaze of the sun,
cooling his wrists when he fell ill with fever, and at night, if they
spoke to each other across his body, keeping their voices low so as not
to break his sleep. King Muene-Motapa had said to them long ago:

"If he escapes, you shall be beaten to death with sticks; but if he
tells me that you have not treated him respectfully, soldier ants shall
eat you alive."

For despite his chains, Lawrence Teck was the chosen friend of the king.

Muene-Motapa had been fond of him even before the drunken riot in which
he got his wounds. This friendship had then become a proprietary
emotion, a compound of affection, remorse, the fear of revenge, and
even a sort of proselytizing zeal mixed up with self-interest.
Muene-Motapa hoped that in time his prisoner would renounce all desire
for the white world, embrace the beliefs and habits of the Mambava,
become a subtle counselor in diplomacy as well as in wars of conquest.
In short, those tales of the lands beyond these forests--the wiles of
Islam, the methods by which the Europeans were eati