eeded quite
briskly, each witch doctor seeming to feel it incumbent upon him to
display his skill and zeal by providing at least as many victims as the
most active and zealous of his brother practitioners. And as victim
after victim fell a sacrifice to as cruel, wicked, and debasing a
superstition as it is possible for the mind to conceive, so did my anger
burn the more fiercely, until I felt an almost irresistible impulse
impelling me to spring to my feet, and, with my pistol levelled at the
king's head, insist upon an end being put to the slaughter.

Yet all the while I knew that I could do nothing in the way of
interposition; I was as utterly helpless as though I had been a thousand
miles away, instead of sitting there within arm's length of the man who
was responsible for it all. For supposing that I should be crazy enough
to obey that impulse, what would happen? Why, the king's guards would
be upon me in a second, and I should be hacked to pieces by their
terrible bangwans in the drawing of a single breath, while probably an
even worse fate would befall my hapless followers! No, of course, the
idea was madness, the act an impossibility; yet when a few minutes later
I saw the tall induna, Logwane--Mapela's friend--led forth and
mercilessly done to death, I could not refrain from leaning toward the
king and murmuring:

"O King, your witch doctors are not infallible; they made a dreadful
mistake when they smelled out that man! Among all your subjects none
was more loyal and faithful than Logwane. Why did you suffer him to be
slain?"

The king glowered at me for a moment, his eyes smouldering with
suppressed anger. Then he answered coldly:

"White man, I believed Logwane to be all that you say. But I was
mistaken, for my witch doctors cannot err; no man can hide his guilt
from them: and had Logwane not harboured treachery in his heart they
would not have smelled him out. Therefore I suffered him to be slain.
No man may think evil of me and continue to live."

At this moment Machenga, who seemed to have gradually sunk into a kind
of trance, rose slowly to his feet, and, with fixed, glassy eyes staring
straight before him, began to mutter to himself in a voice pitched so
low that at first I could distinguish nothing of what he said. Then he
began to glide slowly round in a very small circle, and I perceived that
presently, when he faced me, he raised his head and sniffed the air
strongly. This occurred t