“Never say die,” he ejaculates, half aloud. “I shall live to talk over this fix yet.”
A low mocking laugh at his very elbow breaks the silence of the night. Starting, as if he had been shot, he turns, and, as he does so, he is violently seized from behind. With a spring he shakes himself free. A dozen Kafirs are upon him, and their uplifted assegais flash in the moonlight. A straight, neat hit from the shoulder, and the foremost goes down like a ninepin; but they see that he is unarmed, and fearlessly throw themselves upon him. A rapid struggle, a fall—and in a moment Claverton is lying on the ground, securely bound and helpless as a log.
“Ha—ha—ha!” laughed the tall barbarian who had set his face against the abandonment of the search. “The white man is a wizard. He can melt into air, and then rise up again out of the earth, but we have been too knowing for him this time. Ha—ha—ha!”
“Oh, damn you, do your worst, and the sooner the better,” retorted the prisoner, in a tone of weary, hopeless disgust.
“Ha!” jeered the savage. “Lenzimbi is a skilled wizard. He can disappear into the solid rock. He can light his magic candle and walk through the heart of the earth; but his God has quarrelled with him, and has deserted him at last. Yes, Lenzimbi is a great wizard, a valiant fighting man; but now the black goat lives and the white goat dies. Ha!”
Volume Two—Chapter Twenty One.
”...In Ever Climbing up the Climbing Wave.”
Claverton looked sharply at the speaker. The voice seemed familiar to him, but the features less so. And then, the other had addressed him by the name given him by the natives at the time he was living at Seringa Vale. Not only that. He had uttered words which sounded familiar. In a moment the floodgates of memory were opened; Claverton remembered the midnight meeting at Spoek Krantz, and the oracle with which its proceedings closed. Now his captor had repeated the words of that augury, but had reversed them with grim significance. Still, he thought he saw a glimmer of light.