it is quite clear that I should
never have reached the home of this woman, if woman she were, or have
seen her at all. Before long this became very obvious to me, as shall be
told.

From the night upon which Hans and I failed to rescue Inez we had
no more difficulty in following the trail of the cannibals, who
thenceforward were never more than a few hours ahead of us and had no
time to be careful or to attempt to hide their spoor. Yet so fast did
they travel that do what we would, burdened and wearied as we were, it
proved impossible to overtake them.

For the first three days the track ran on through scattered, rolling
bush-veld of the character that I have described, but tending
continually down hill. When we broke camp on the morning of the fourth
day, eating a hasty meal at dawn (for now game had become astonishingly
plentiful, so that we did not lack food) the rising sun showed beneath
us an endless sea of billowy mist stretching in every direction far as
the sight could carry.

To the north, however, it did come to an end, for there, as I judged
fifty or sixty miles away, rose the grim outline of what looked like a
huge fortress, which I knew must be one of those extraordinary mountain
formations, probably owing their origin to volcanic action, that are to
be met with here and there in the vast expanses of Central and Eastern
Africa. Being so distant it was impossible to estimate its size, which
I guessed must be enormous, but in looking at it I bethought me of that
great mountain in which Zikali said the marvellous white Queen lived,
and wondered whether it could be the same, as from my memory of his map
upon the ashes, it well might be, that is, if such a place existed
at all. If so the map had shown it as surrounded by swamps and--well,
surely that mist hid the face of a mighty swamp?

It did indeed, since before nightfall, following the spoor of those
Amahagger, we had plunged into a morass so vast that in all my
experience I have never seen or heard of its like. It was a veritable
ocean of papyrus and other reeds, some of them a dozen or more feet
high, so that it was impossible to see a yard in any direction.

Here it was that the Amahagger ahead of us proved our salvation, since
without them to guide us we must soon have perished. For through that
gigantic swamp there ran a road, as I think an ancient road, since in
one or two places I saw stone work which must have been laid by man. Yet
it was not a