th or Brown. The third is your wife's sleep-walking
propensities, which would have made it quite easy for her to be drawn
ashore under some kind of mesmeric influence. The fourth is that you had
seen Arabs mounted on camels upon the banks of the Nile. The fifth is
the heavy sleep you say held everybody on board that particular night,
which suggests to me that your food may have been drugged. The sixth is
the apathy displayed by those employed in the search, which suggests to
me that some person or persons in authority may have been bribed, as is
common in the East, or perhaps frightened with threats of bewitchment.
The seventh is that a night was chosen when a wind blew which would
obliterate all spoor whether of men or of swiftly travelling camels.
These are enough to begin with, though doubtless if I had time to think
I could find others. You must remember too that although the journey
would be long, this country of the Kendah can doubtless be reached
from the Sudan by those who know the road, as well as from southern or
eastern Africa."

"Then you think that my wife has been kidnapped by those villains, Harut
and Marut?"

"Of course, though villains is a strong term to apply to them. They
might be quite honest men according to their peculiar lights, as indeed
I expect they are. Remember that they serve a god or a fetish, or
rather, as they believe, a god _in_ a fetish, who to them doubtless is
a very terrible master, especially when, as I understand, that god is
threatened by a rival god."

"Why do you say that, Quatermain?"

By way of answer I repeated to him the story which Hans said he had
heard from the old woman at Beza, the town of the Mazitu. Lord Ragnall
listened with the deepest interest, then said in an agitated voice:

"That is a very strange tale, but has it struck you, Quatermain, that
if your suppositions are correct, one of the most terrible circumstances
connected with my case is that our child should have chanced to come to
its dreadful death through the wickedness of an elephant?"

"That curious coincidence has struck me most forcibly, Lord Ragnall.
At the same time I do not see how it can be set down as more than
a coincidence, since the elephant which slaughtered your child was
certainly not that called Jana. To suppose because there is a war
between an elephant-god and a child-god somewhere in the heart of
Africa, that therefore another elephant can be so influenced that it
kills a child i