l." Then, removing the door-board, the wizard
passed from the hut and was gone.

*****

The vision changed. Now there appeared a valley walled in on either side
with sloping cliffs of granite; a desolate place, sandy and, save for a
single spring, without water, strewn with boulders of rock, some of them
piled fantastically one upon the other. At a certain spot this valley
widened out, and in the mouth of the space thus formed, midway between
the curved lines of the receding cliffs, stood a little hill or koppie,
also built up of boulders. It was a place of death; for all around the
hill, and piled in hundreds between the crevices of its stones, lay the
white bones of men.

Nor was this all. Its summit was flat, and in the midst of it stood
a huge tree. Even had it not been for the fruit which hung from its
branches, the aspect of that tree must have struck the beholder as
uncanny, even as horrible. The bark on its great bole was leprous white;
and from its gaunt and spreading rungs rose branches that subdivided
themselves again and again, till at last they terminated in round green
fingers, springing from grey, flat slabs of bark, in shape not unlike
that of a human palm. Indeed, from a little distance this tree,
especially if viewed by moonlight, had the appearance of bearing on
it hundreds or thousands of the arms and hands of men, all of them
stretched imploringly to Heaven.

Well might they seem to do so, seeing that to its naked limbs hung the
bodies of at least twenty human beings who had suffered death by order
of the king or his captains, or by the decree of the company of wizards,
whereof Hokosa was the chief. There on the Hill of Death stood the Tree
of Death; and that in its dank shade, or piled upon the ground beneath
it, hung and lay the pitiful remnants of the multitudes who for
generations had been led thither to their doom.

Now, in Owen's vision a man was seen approaching by the little pathway
that ran up the side of the mount--the Road of Lost Footsteps it was
called. It was Hokosa the wizard. Outside the circle of the tree he
halted, and drawing a tanned skin from a bundle of medicines which he
carried, he tied it about his mouth; for the very smell of that tree is
poisonous and must not be suffered to reach the lungs.

Presently he was under the branches, where once again he halted; this
time it was to gaze at the body of an old man which swung to and fro in
the night breeze.

"Ah! friend,"