afraid of the future, especially
as it has been taken out of me pretty well in the present, though of
course I _am_ afraid for all that, every man is. The only thing that
troubles me is a doubt whether we ought to take Juanna into such a
place. But really I do not know but what it would be as dangerous to go
back as to proceed: those gentlemen with the poisoned arrows may have
recovered from their fear of firearms by now."

"I wish we had nothing worse than the Hereafter to fear," said Francisco
with a sigh. "It is the journey thither that is so terrible. As for
our expedition, having undertaken it, I think on the whole that we had
better persevere, especially as the senora wishes it, and she is very
hard to turn. After all our lives are in the hands of the Almighty, and
therefore we shall be just as safe, or unsafe, among the People of the
Mist as in a European city. Those of us who are destined to live will
live, and those whose hour is at hand must die. And now good night, for
I am going to sleep."

Next morning, shortly before dawn, Leonard was awakened by a hubbub
among the natives, and creeping out of his blankets, he found that
some of them, who had been to the river to draw water, had captured two
bushmen belonging to a nomadic tribe that lived by spearing fish. These
wretched creatures, who notwithstanding the cold only wore a piece of
bark tied round their shoulders, were screaming with fright, and it
was not until they had been pacified by gifts of beads and empty brass
cartridges that anything could be got out of them.

When confidence had at length been restored, Otter questioned them
closely as to the country that lay beyond the wall of rock and the
people who dwelt in it, through one of the Settlement men, who spoke a
language sufficiently like their own to make himself understood. They
replied that they had never been in that country themselves, because
they dared not go there, but they had heard of it from others.

The land was very cold and foggy, they said, so foggy that sometimes
people could not see each other for whole days, and in it dwelt a race
of great men covered with hair, who sacrificed strangers to a snake
which they worshipped, and married all their fairest maidens to a god.
That was all they knew of the country and of the great men, for few who
visited there ever returned to tell tidings. It was certainly a haunted
land.

Finding that there was no more to be learnt from the bushmen,