ry, "it is far. But there is no journey upon
this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is
nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not
climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross, save a mountain and a
desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he
holds his life in his hands counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or
lose it as Heaven above may order."

I translated.

"Great words, my father," answered the Zulu--I always called him a
Zulu, though he was not really one--"great swelling words fit to fill
the mouth of a man. Thou art right, my father Incubu. Listen! what is
life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and
thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes
carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it
may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to
try and journey one's road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At
the worst he can but die a little sooner. I will go with thee across
the desert and over the mountains, unless perchance I fall to the
ground on the way, my father."

He paused awhile, and then went on with one of those strange bursts of
rhetorical eloquence that Zulus sometimes indulge in, which to my mind,
full though they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no
means devoid of poetic instinct and of intellectual power.

"What is life? Tell me, O white men, who are wise, who know the secrets
of the world, and of the world of stars, and the world that lies above
and around the stars; who flash your words from afar without a voice;
tell me, white men, the secret of our life--whither it goes and whence
it comes!

"You cannot answer me; you know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the
dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we
fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of
the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing.
Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the
glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it
is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that
runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset."

"You are a strange man," said Sir Henry, when he had ceased.

Umbopa laughed. "It seems to me that we are much alike, Incubu. Perhaps
_I_ seek a brother over the mo