"Nice lovely shad! Nice lovely shad!"
Two water-carts, clanking along in opposite directions, left a dark track behind them on the dusty road, sending up a heavy odour of wet earth which the girl snuffed up as though she had some transportingly sweet perfume at her delicate nostrils.
"I'm sure there is no smell in the world like the smell of wet Africa," she cried softly to herself, laughing a little. Her eyes took on a misty look that made them like lilac with the dew on it.
Her black hair, which branched out on either side of her forehead, had a trick of spraying little veils of itself over her eyes and almost touching her cheek-bones, which were pitched high in her face, giving it an extraordinarily subtle look.
She was amazingly attractive in a glowing ardent fashion that paled the other women in the street and made men step to the edge of the pavement to stare at her.
She looked at them, too, through the spraying veils of her hair, but her face remained perfectly composed under the swathes of white chiffon which she wore flung back over her wide hat, brought down at the sides and twisted round her throat, with two long flying ends.
The big Zulu boy between the shafts, running noiselessly except for the pat of his bare feet and the "Tch-k, tch-k, tch-k" of the seed bangles round his ankles, became conscious that his fare was creating interest. He began to put on airs, giving little shouts of glorification, taking leaps in the air and tilting the shafts of the rickshaw backwards to the discomfort of its occupant.
She leaned forward, and in a low voice spoke a few edged words in Zulu that made him change his manners and give a glance of astonishment behind him, crying:
"Aa-h! Yeh—boo Inkosizaan!" behaving himself thereafter with decorum, for it was a disconcerting thing that an Inkosizaan who had come straight off the mail-steamer at the Point should speak words of reproof to him in his own language.
Presently he came to the foot of the Berea Hill, which is long and sloping, causing him to slacken pace and draw deep breaths.