mouth and streams of light in his
eyes, crawling towards him.

"'Weak man,' he cried, as he passed. 'Thou fearest to obey. Follow me.'

"An instant later the great crocodile had crawled over the edge of the
precipice, and a moment afterwards Gogo had followed his example. It
seemed as if he were in the air an hour, but suddenly his horse's hoofs
touched earth again; the animal never fell into the terrible abyss, but
merely tore up a piece of the turf where he had stood. He looked around;
Zomara had disappeared, but in the hole that the horse's hoof had caused
he saw a large ring of iron. Dismounting, he tried to raise it, but only
after two hours' work he succeeded in moving it and excavating from its
hiding-place an enormous chest filled with gold pieces and costly jewels,
and so he lived in affluence the remainder of his life, till Zomara took
him to be one of his councillors. So are the righteous rewarded."

Then some thick-lipped musicians struck up music on quaintly-shaped
stringed instruments, and the strange old man, bearing a kind of
tambourine in his hand, came round to collect coins, the collection being
repeated at the conclusion of each legend.

In one of his stories mention was made in the most matter-of-fact manner
of a sick person being buried alive. This caused me to address some
questions to Liola, who, seated near me, told me that this terrible
custom was one recently introduced by the Naya.

"The ghastly practice is supposed to appease Zomara and give us victory
over our enemies," she said. "As soon as any serious illness setteth in,
the patient is taken from his house wrapped in his best robes, deposited
in a grave and then covered with earth. No one in Mo now dieth a natural
death. When the body hath been placed in the grave, the friends of the
dead man set forth to kill the first living creature they can encounter,
man, woman or beast, believing that through their victim their friend
hath been compelled to die. When thus in search of an expiatory victim,
they take the precaution of breaking off young shoots of the shrubs as
they pass by, leaving the broken ends hanging in the direction they are
going as a warning to people to shun that path. Even should one of their
own relatives be the first to meet the avengers they dare not suffer him
to escape."

"Life is not very secure in Mo when sickness rageth," I observed.

"No," she replied, sighing. "It is merely one of the many horrible
practices