sake. Take them nowhere else. Bring them hither if they would
escape trouble. I shall be glad to see you, Macumazahn, for at
last I am about to smite the Zulu House of Senzangacona, my foes,
with a bladder full of blood, and oh! it stains their doorposts
red."

Then I woke up, feeling afraid, as one does after a nightmare,
and was comforted to hear Anscombe sleeping quietly on the other
side of the room.

"Mauriti. Why did Zikali call him Mauriti?" I wondered drowsily
to myself. "Oh! of course his name is Maurice, and it was a Zulu
corruption of a common sort as was Heddana of Heda." Then I
dozed off again, and by the morning had forgotten all about my
dream until it was brought back to me by subsequent events.
Still it was this and nothing else that put it into my head to
fly to Zululand on an emergency that was to arise ere long.*

[*--For the history of Zikali and Mameena see the book called
_Child of Storm_ by H. Rider Haggard.]

That evening Rodd was absent from dinner, and on inquiring where
he might be, I was informed that he had ridden to visit a Kaffir
headman, a patient of his who lived at a distance, and would very
probably sleep at the kraal, returning early next day. One of
the topics of conversation during dinner was as to where the
exact boundary line used to run between the Transvaal and the
country over which the Basuto chief, Sekukuni, claimed ownership
and jurisdiction. Marnham said that it passed within a couple of
miles of his house, and when we rose, the moon being very bright,
offered to show me where the beacons had been placed years before
by a Boer Commission. I accepted, as the night was lovely for a
stroll after the hot day. Also I was half conscious of another
undefined purpose in my mind, which perhaps may have spread to
that of Marnham. Those two young people looked very happy
together there on the stoep, and as they must part so soon it
would, I thought, be kind to give them the opportunity of a quiet
chat.

So off we went to the brow of the hill on which the Temple stood,
whence old Marnham pointed out to me a beacon, which I could not
see in the dim, silvery bush-veld below, and how the line ran
from it to another beacon somewhere else.

"You know the Yellow-wood swamp," he said. "It passes straight
through that. That is why those Basutos who were following you
pulled up upon the edge of the swamp, though as a matter of fact,
according to their ideas, they had a p