The aspect of the great savage was so terrific, the sudden change so startling, that Nidia put her hands over her eyes and shrank back with a faint cry, expecting every moment to feel the hard wood crash down upon her head. Trembling now in every limb, she obeyed without hesitation the command so startlingly emphasised, and crawled as best she could in the wake of Shiminya, Nanzicele bringing up the rear.
The tunnel did not last long, and soon they were able to proceed upright, but still between high walls of the same impenetrable thorn. Lateral passages branched out on either side in such labyrinthine tortuosity of confusion that Nidia’s first thought was how it would be possible for any one to find his way through here a second time.
Soon a low whining sound was heard in front; then the thorns seemed to meet in an arch overhead. Passing beneath this, the trio stood in a circular open space, at the upper end of which were three huts, “What place is this?” exclaimed Nidia, striving not to allow her alarm to show in her voice, for in her heart was a terrible sinking. There was that about this retreat which suggested the den of a wild beast rather than an abode of human beings, even though barbarians. How helpless, how completely at the mercy of these two she felt.
“You stay here,” replied Nanzicele. “Sikumbutana too far. Go there to-morrow. Plenty Matabele about make trouble. You stay here.”
There was plausibility about the explanation which went far to satisfy her. The situation was a nervous one for a solitary unprotected woman; but she had been through so much within the last twenty-four hours that her sensibilities were becoming blunted. They offered her some boiled corn, but she was too tired to eat. She asked for water, and they brought her some, greasy, uninviting, in a clay bowl, but her thirst was intense.
“You go in there—go to sleep,” said Nanzicele, opening one of the huts.
“But I would rather sleep outside.”
“You go in there,” he repeated, more threateningly. And Nidia, recollecting the knobstick argument, obeyed.
The hut was stuffy and close; suggestive, too, of creeping things both small and great; but, fortunately, she was too completely exhausted to allow room for nervous fears, and sleep overwhelmed her. Sleep! The ghosts of former victims done to death amid every circumstance of horror within that den arose not to appal her. She slept on in blissful ignorance; slept—within the scarce-known retreat of one of the most atrocious monsters of cruelty that ever flourished amid even a barbarous race—slept—within the web of the crafty blood-sucking human spider.
Nanzicele departed, and the sorcerer, having secured the entrances to his den with thick thorn branches, sat crouching over a small red fire, his plotting brain ever at work. He was in high good humour, for here was a new victim for him to practise some of his favourite barbarities upon. In this case they must be refined forms of barbarity, such as would torture the mind rather more acutely than the red-hot iron would the body, and a better subject for such he thought he had never seen. So he squatted there, and gleefully chuckled. Beside him crouched the wolf. “Ah, ah, Lupiswana!” he exclaimed, addressing his familiar spirit. “It may be that thou shalt sink thy fangs into white flesh—dainty delicate flesh, Lupiswana. White blood, too—white red blood—richer, more rare than that of Nompiza, and such. It is sleeping now. Come, Lupiswana; we will go forth and see.”