their singing rises shrill and
loud. A man is touched with the fatal wand. In a moment a thong is
about his neck, and two of the slayers are leading him forth to the
great gate--are leading him forth to the place of slaughter--to die!
Two more now are touched! They also are led forth in like manner
immediately behind the first. A great gasp, like a sob, sways the
multitude; and in dead silence a way is opened out for these ill-fated
ones, passing through to their death. Then, as the people take up once
more the chorus of the wizard song, an _imbonga_, standing at the King's
side, names aloud those who have thus looked their last upon the sun.
But the progress of the _izanusi_ continues, and by the time they have
gone half through the ranks some thirty men have been named: and now we
can see these stringing up the slope outside the kraal, in the direction
of the place of slaughter--they and their slayers--and, in the dead and
awesome silence which now and again falls upon the immense crowd, can
hear the dull crashing of broken skulls, and the distant and hollow
groans, as the great knobsticks of the executioners are already
beginning their fell work. And still the line of doomed men is
ascending to the hill of death; and far above, like a gathering cloud in
the heavens, the white pinions of vultures are wheeling and soaring,
impatient to begin, for such a feast as this great destruction of
evil-doers has never yet been theirs since they began to follow our
migrating nation for their food.

By the time the witch-finders had made the complete round of those
gathered together, upwards of fourscore men had been smelt out, and the
remaining body of slayers, with disappointment upon their fierce
countenances, stole envious looks out towards the place of death, where
the crash of knobsticks and the hollow groans of the doomed had almost
ceased. Not a cry, however, floated from thence, for no women had been
among those named. All were warriors; and the warriors of our race
faced death in those days without a cry, albeit the groan which often
followed the crash of the knobstick was the voice of the parting
_itongo_, or spirit, not of the body which had contained it. And of
those who had been named a number were of Ncwelo's kraal; others were of
the houses of other chiefs, including that of Senkonya; some few,
indeed, were of my own particular fighters. These last, on being
touched, were immediately disarmed by their br