Simba and Cazi Moto waited near. From the mysterious sources every native African seems to possess they had produced new hats and various trinkets. Their khakis had been fresh washed; so they looked neat and trim.
The Leopard Woman wore still one of her silken negligées, and the jewel on her forehead; but her hair had been piled high on her head. Kingozi surveyed her with some particularity. She noted the fact. Her satisfaction would have diminished could she have read his mind. He was thinking that her appearance was sufficiently barbaric to impress a barbaric king.
They rounded the point of cliffs, and the village lay before them. It rambled up the side of the mountain, hundreds of beehive houses perched and clinging, with paths from one to the other. The approach was through a narrow straight lane of thorn and aloes, so thick and so spiky that no living thing bigger than a mouse could have forced its way through the walls. The end of this vista was a heavy palisade of timbers through which a door led into a circular enclosure ten feet in diameter, on the other side of which another door opened into the village. Above each of these doors massive timbers were suspended ready to fall at the cut of a sword. Within the little enclosure, or double gate, squatted a man before a great drum.
"They're pretty well fixed here," observed Kingozi critically. "Nobody can get at them except down that lane. The mountains are impassable because of the thorn. They must use arrows."
"Why?" asked the Leopard Woman.
"The form of their defence. They shoot between the logs of the palisade down the narrow lane. If they fought only with spears, the lane would be shorter, and it would be defended on the flank."
"Why don't they defend it on the flank also, even with arrows?" asked the Leopard Woman shrewdly.
"'It is not the custom,'" wearily quoted Kingozi in the vernacular. "Don't ask me why a savage does things. I only know he does."
Their conversation was drowned by the sound of the drum.
The guardian did not beat it, but rubbed the head rapidly with the stick, modifying the pressure scientifically until the vibrations had well started. It roared hollowly, like some great bull.