Thornhill had strolled away while the two were talking and was standing, shading a match to light his pipe, when—
“Inkose!”
He started slightly. The mountain top was flat and he had seen no one on it but themselves. The salute, however, had proceeded from a tall native, who had risen from behind the flat boulder before mentioned.
This man now advanced, and in the limp of his gait, the other recognised him as the Zulu. Then—Heavens and earth! He had wondered where he had seen him before. Now he knew.
But it was ghastly. No, the thing could not be. It was only a striking likeness. Moonlight is untrustworthy—and now, this light up here in the afterglow of the sunset was dusking. The Zulu stood—contemplating him with a faint, ironical grin.
“There are ‘mouths’ on this mountain top,” he began, “waiting to swallow up men—and women,” he added, with a glance at Edala who together with her companion had now come up. “Whau! it is easy to fall into such. There are those that only half swallow, and return their prey, such as that,”—pointing with his knobstick to the mouth of a crevice a few yards on the other side of the boulder. “Yet it may be that the prey though it returns to life does not do so unbitten. There are other ‘mouths’ who do not return their prey at all, and if it is sought for it is too late, for it is already dead.”
To two of the listeners this bit of dark talking was intelligible because they were familiar with the tricks and turns of the Zulu language. The speaker merely meant to convey that some of the crevices were more dangerous than others. But to the third there was nothing ‘dark’ about it. And then, either from the fact—which no one but herself would have noticed—that her father’s voice had lost some of its imperturbability, or by some mysterious conjunction of weird telepathy—Edala began to think there must be some deeper, darker meaning underlying the words. All sorts of ghastly conjectures shot through her mind, but all vague, shadowy, nebulous. Through them she heard the voice of Elvesdon questioning the stranger.
“Who are you?”
“Manamandhla, son of Gwegula.”
“Of the Zulu?”