r side of the pyramid, though steep, was smooth enough to enable
him to ride nearly to the top. Here, however, he was obliged to leave
his horse and ascend on foot by a rough-hewn but well-worn path.

The summit was large enough to hold about fifty persons. It was
smoothly rounded, with a hollow depression in the centre. And as
Gerard's glance fell upon this, every drop of blood within him seemed to
turn to ice.

A sharp, tough stake, pointed at the top, rose upright in the centre of
the hollow, and upon this stake, in a sitting posture, shrivelled, half
mummified, was impaled a human body. The head lay over on the shoulder,
and on the features, drawn back from the bared teeth in a grin of
ghastly torment, was the most horrible expression of fear and agony.
The eyeballs, lustreless and shrunken, stared upon the intruder with a
stare that might haunt him to his dying day, and gazing upon the grisly
contortion of the bound and trussed limbs--the terrible attitude--the
foetid odour of the corpse--for in this dry atmosphere decomposition had
been a long and gradual process--it seemed to the petrified and
unutterably horror-stricken spectator that the tortured wretch must
still have life in him.

Recovering by a strong effort of will some degree of self-possession,
for the horrid sight had turned him sick and faint, Gerard drew nearer
to the corpse. The stake, burnt and hardened to a point, was of the
_umzimbili_ or iron-wood. This was clearly not the first time it had
been so used, and now as he remembered the skulls and bones lying
beneath, he thought with a shudder on the numbers of wretches who might
have suffered this most hideous of deaths. Heavens! and might not he
himself, and Dawes, be called upon to suffer in like fashion, at the
mercy, as they were, of this horde of cruel barbarians?

He turned his face outward to look over the valley. The sweet golden
sunshine, now declining, shed a softened and beautiful light upon the
verdure of the bush, toning down the angles of the grey cliffs. Blue
smoke clouds curled lazily upward from the great circle of the kraal,
lying below in the distance, and the sound of far-away voices floated
melodiously, pleasingly upon the clear still air. It was a lovely
scene, a scene that many might travel any distance to look upon, but to
him who now gazed upon it from this grim and horrid Golgotha it was
darker, blacker than the Tartarus of Dante.

Then another sight arrested