“It will come—yes, it will come—when we two have long since been food for the alligators,” I answered impatiently. “The King’s word is that I slay this horror—this tagati thing—by the foil of the moon. What if I fail, Lalusini?”
“Fail? Fail? Does he who rolled back the might of the Twin Stars of Zulu talk about failure? Now, nay, Untúswa—now, nay,” she answered, with that strange and wonderful smile of hers.
“I know not. Now cast me ‘the bones,’ Lalusini, that I may know what success, if any, lieth before me against the Red Terror.”
“The bones? Ha! Such methods are too childish for such as I, Untúswa,” she answered lightly. “Yet—wait—”
She ceased to speak and her face clouded, even as I had seen it when she was about to fall into one of her divining trances. Anxiously I watched her. Her lips moved, but in silence. Her eyes seemed to look through me, into nowhere. Then I saw she was holding out something in her hand. Bending over I gazed. She had held nothing when we sat down nor was there any place of concealment whence she could have produced anything. But that which lay in her hand was a flat bag, made of the dressed skin of an impala. Then she spoke—and her voice was as the voice of one who talks in a dream.
“See thou part not from this, Untúswa. Yet seek not to look within—until such time as thy wit and the wit of others fail thee—or the múti will be of no avail—nay more, will be harmful. But in extremity make use of what is herein—in extremity only—when at thy wit’s end.”
Still held by her eyes, I reached forth my hand and took the múti bag, securing it round my neck by a stout leather thong which formed part of the hide from whence the bag had been cut. As I did so, Lalusini murmured of strange things—of ghost caves, and of whole impis devoured in alligator-haunted swamps—and of a wilder, weirder mystery still, which was beyond my poor powers of understanding—I being but a fighter and no izanusi at all. Then her eyes grew calm, and with a sigh as of relief she was herself again.
Now I tried to go behind what she had been saying, but it was useless. She had returned from the spirit world, and being once more in this, knew not what she had seen or said while in the other. Even the múti pouch, now fastened to my neck, she glanced upon as though she had never seen it before.
“Go now, Untúswa,” she said.
We embraced each other with great affection, and Lalusini with her own hands armed me with my weapons—the white shield, and the great dark-handled assegai which was the former gift of the King, also my heavy knobkerrie of rhinoceros horn, and three or four light casting spears—but no feather crest or other war adornments did I put on. Then I stepped forth.