「ソロモン王の洞窟」第7章・・・ソロモンの街道 SOLOMON'S ROAD

「ソロモン王の洞窟」第7章・・・ソロモンの街道

SOLOMON'S ROAD

Outside the cavern we halted, feeling rather foolish.

"I am going back," said Sir Henry.

"Why?" asked Good.

"Because it has struck me that--what we saw--may be my brother."

This was a new idea, and we re-entered the place to put it to the
proof. After the bright light outside, our eyes, weak as they were
with staring at the snow, could not pierce the gloom of the cave for a
while. Presently, however, they grew accustomed to the semi-darkness,
and we advanced towards the dead man.

Sir Henry knelt down and peered into his face.

"Thank God," he said, with a sigh of relief, "it is /not/ my brother."

Then I drew near and looked. The body was that of a tall man in middle
life with aquiline features, grizzled hair, and a long black
moustache. The skin was perfectly yellow, and stretched tightly over
the bones. Its clothing, with the exception of what seemed to be the
remains of a woollen pair of hose, had been removed, leaving the
skeleton-like frame naked. Round the neck of the corpse, which was
frozen perfectly stiff, hung a yellow ivory crucifix.

"Who on earth can it be?" said I.

"Can't you guess?" asked Good.

I shook my head.

"Why, the old Dom, Jose da Silvestra, of course--who else?"

"Impossible," I gasped; "he died three hundred years ago."

"And what is there to prevent him from lasting for three thousand
years in this atmosphere, I should like to know?" asked Good. "If only
the temperature is sufficiently low, flesh and blood will keep fresh
as New Zealand mutton for ever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough
here. The sun never gets in here; no animal comes here to tear or
destroy. No doubt his slave, of whom he speaks on the writing, took
off his clothes and left him. He could not have buried him alone.
Look!" he went on, stooping down to pick up a queerly-shaped bone
scraped at the end into a sharp point, "here is the 'cleft bone' that
Silvestra used to draw the map with."

We gazed for a moment astonished, forgetting our own miseries in this
extraordinary and, as it seemed to us, semi-miraculous sight.

"Ay," said Sir Henry, "and this is where he got his ink from," and he
pointed to a small wound on the Dom's left arm. "Did ever man see such
a thing before?"

There was no longer any doubt about the matter, which for my own part
I confess perfectly appalled me. There he sat, the dead man, whose
directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot.
Here in my own hand was the rude pen with which he had written them,
and about his neck hung the crucifix that his dying lips had kissed.
Gazing at him, my imagination could reconstruct the last scene of the
drama, the traveller dying of cold and starvation, yet striving to
convey to the world the great secret which he had discovered:--the
awful loneliness of his death, of which the evidence sat before us. It
even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly-marked features a
likeness to those of my poor friend Silvestre his descendant, who had
died twenty years before in my arms, but perhaps that was fancy. At
any rate, there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often
overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there
doubtless he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death,
for centuries yet unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like
ourselves, if ever any such should come again to invade his
loneliness. The thing overpowered us, already almost perished as we
were with cold and hunger.

"Let us go," said Sir Henry in a low voice; "stay, we will give him a
companion," and lifting up the dead body of the Hottentot Ventvoegel,
he placed it near to that of the old Dom. Then he stooped, and with a
jerk broke the rotten string of the crucifix which hung round da
Silvestra's neck, for his fingers were too cold to attempt to unfasten
it. I believe that he has it still. I took the bone pen, and it is
before me as I write--sometimes I use it to sign my name.

Then leaving these two, the proud white man of a past age, and the
poor Hottentot, to keep their eternal vigil in the midst of the
eternal snows, we crept out of the cave into the welcome sunshine and
resumed our path, wondering in our hearts how many hours it would be
before we were even as they are.

When we had walked about half a mile we came to the edge of the
plateau, for the nipple of the mountain does not rise out of its exact
centre, though from the desert side it had seemed to do so. What lay
below us we could not see, for the landscape was wreathed in billows
of morning fog. Presently, however, the higher layers of mist cleared
a little, and revealed, at the end of a long slope of snow, a patch of
green grass, some five hundred yards beneath us, through which a
stream was running. Nor was this all. By the stream, basking in the
bright sun, stood and lay a group of from ten to fifteen /large
antelopes/--at that distance we could not see of what species.

The sight filled us with an unreasoning joy. If only we could get it,
there was food in plenty. But the question was how to do so. The
beasts were fully six hundred yards off, a very long shot, and one not
to be depended on when our lives hung on the results.

Rapidly we discussed the advisability of trying to stalk the game, but
in the end dismissed it reluctantly. To begin with, the wind was not
favourable, and further, we must certainly be perceived, however
careful we were, against the blinding background of snow, which we
should be obliged to traverse.

"Well, we must have a try from where we are," said Sir Henry. "Which
shall it be, Quatermain, the repeating rifles or the expresses?"

Here again was a question. The Winchester repeaters--of which we had
two, Umbopa carrying poor Ventvoegel's as well as his own--were sighted
up to a thousand yards, whereas the expresses were only sighted to
three hundred and fifty, beyond which distance shooting with them was
more or less guess-work. On the other hand, if they did hit, the
express bullets, being "expanding," were much more likely to bring the
game down. It was a knotty point, but I made up my mind that we must
risk it and use the expresses.

"Let each of us take the buck opposite to him. Aim well at the point
of the shoulder and high up," said I; "and Umbopa, do you give the
word, so that we may all fire together."

Then came a pause, each of us aiming his level best, as indeed a man
is likely to do when he knows that life itself depends upon the shot.

"Fire," said Umbopa in Zulu, and at almost the same instant the three
rifles rang out loudly; three clouds of smoke hung for a moment before
us, and a hundred echoes went flying over the silent snow. Presently
the smoke cleared, and revealed--oh, joy!--a great buck lying on its
back and kicking furiously in its death agony. We gave a yell of
triumph--we were saved--we should not starve. Weak as we were, we
rushed down the intervening slope of snow, and in ten minutes from the
time of shooting, that animal's heart and liver were lying before us.
But now a new difficulty arose, we had no fuel, and therefore could
make no fire to cook them. We gazed at each other in dismay.

"Starving men should not be fanciful," said Good; "we must eat raw
meat."

There was no other way out of the dilemma, and our gnawing hunger made
the proposition less distasteful than it would otherwise have been. So
we took the heart and liver and buried them for a few minutes in a
patch of snow to cool them. Then we washed them in the ice-cold water
of the stream, and lastly ate them greedily. It sounds horrible
enough, but honestly, I never tasted anything so good as that raw
meat. In a quarter of an hour we were changed men. Our life and vigour
came back to us, our feeble pulses grew strong again, and the blood
went coursing through our veins. But mindful of the results of over-
feeding on starved stomachs, we were careful not to eat too much,
stopping whilst we were still hungry.

"Thank Heaven!" said Sir Henry; "that brute has saved our lives. What
is it, Quatermain?"

I rose and went to look at the antelope, for I was not certain. It was
about the size of a donkey, with large curved horns. I had never seen
one like it before; the species was new to me. It was brown in colour,
with faint red stripes, and grew a thick coat. I afterwards discovered
that the natives of that wonderful country call these bucks "/inco/."
They are very rare, and only found at a great altitude where no other
game will live. This animal was fairly hit high up in the shoulder,
though whose bullet brought it down we could not, of course, discover.
I believe that Good, mindful of his marvellous shot at the giraffe,
secretly set it down to his own prowess, and we did not contradict
him.

We had been so busy satisfying our hunger that hitherto we had not
found time to look about us. But now, having set Umbopa to cut off as
much of the best meat as we were likely to be able to carry, we began
to inspect our surroundings. The mist had cleared away, for it was
eight o'clock, and the sun had sucked it up, so we were able to take
in all the country before us at a glance. I know not how to describe
the glorious panorama which unfolded itself to our gaze. I have never
seen anything like it before, nor shall, I suppose, again.

Behind and over us towered Sheba's snowy Breasts, and below, some five
thousand feet beneath where we stood, lay league on league of the most
lovely champaign country. Here were dense patches of lofty forest,
there a great river wound its silvery way. To the left stretched a
vast expanse of rich, undulating veld or grass land, whereon we could
just make out countless herds of game or cattle, at that distance we
could not tell which. This expanse appeared to be ringed in by a wall
of distant mountains. To the right the country was more or less
mountainous; that is, solitary hills stood up from its level, with
stretches of cultivated land between, amongst which we could see
groups of dome-shaped huts. The landscape lay before us as a map,
wherein rivers flashed like silver snakes, and Alp-like peaks crowned
with wildly twisted snow wreaths rose in grandeur, whilst over all was
the glad sunlight and the breath of Nature's happy life.

Two curious things struck us as we gazed. First, that the country
before us must lie at least three thousand feet higher than the desert
we had crossed, and secondly, that all the rivers flowed from south to
north. As we had painful reason to know, there was no water upon the
southern side of the vast range on which we stood, but on the northern
face were many streams, most of which appeared to unite with the great
river we could see winding away farther than our eyes could follow.

We sat down for a while and gazed in silence at this wonderful view.
Presently Sir Henry spoke.

"Isn't there something on the map about Solomon's Great Road?" he
said.

I nodded, for I was still gazing out over the far country.

"Well, look; there it is!" and he pointed a little to our right.

Good and I looked accordingly, and there, winding away towards the
plain, was what appeared to be a wide turnpike road. We had not seen
it at first because, on reaching the plain, it turned behind some
broken country. We did not say anything, at least, not much; we were
beginning to lose the sense of wonder. Somehow it did not seem
particularly unnatural that we should find a sort of Roman road in
this strange land. We accepted the fact, that was all.

"Well," said Good, "it must be quite near us if we cut off to the
right. Hadn't we better be making a start?"

This was sound advice, and so soon as we had washed our faces and
hands in the stream we acted on it. For a mile or more we made our way
over boulders and across patches of snow, till suddenly, on reaching
the top of the little rise, we found the road at our feet. It was a
splendid road cut out of the solid rock, at least fifty feet wide, and
apparently well kept; though the odd thing was that it seemed to begin
there. We walked down and stood on it, but one single hundred paces
behind us, in the direction of Sheba's Breasts, it vanished, the
entire surface of the mountain being strewn with boulders interspersed
with patches of snow.

"What do you make of this, Quatermain?" asked Sir Henry.

I shook my head, I could make nothing of the thing.

"I have it!" said Good; "the road no doubt ran right over the range
and across the desert on the other side, but the sand there has
covered it up, and above us it has been obliterated by some volcanic
eruption of molten lava."

This seemed a good suggestion; at any rate, we accepted it, and
proceeded down the mountain. It proved a very different business
travelling along down hill on that magnificent pathway with full
stomachs from what it was travelling uphill over the snow quite
starved and almost frozen. Indeed, had it not been for melancholy
recollections of poor Ventvoegel's sad fate, and of that grim cave
where he kept company with the old Dom, we should have felt positively
cheerful, notwithstanding the sense of unknown dangers before us.
Every mile we walked the atmosphere grew softer and balmier, and the
country before us shone with a yet more luminous beauty. As for the
road itself, I never saw such an engineering work, though Sir Henry
said that the great road over the St. Gothard in Switzerland is very
similar. No difficulty had been too great for the Old World engineer
who laid it out. At one place we came to a ravine three hundred feet
broad and at least a hundred feet deep. This vast gulf was actually
filled in with huge blocks of dressed stone, having arches pierced
through them at the bottom for a waterway, over which the road went on
sublimely. At another place it was cut in zigzags out of the side of a
precipice five hundred feet deep, and in a third it tunnelled through
the base of an intervening ridge, a space of thirty yards or more.

Here we noticed that the sides of the tunnel were covered with quaint
sculptures, mostly of mailed figures driving in chariots. One, which
was exceedingly beautiful, represented a whole battle scene with a
convoy of captives being marched off in the distance.

"Well," said Sir Henry, after inspecting this ancient work of art, "it
is very well to call this Solomon's Road, but my humble opinion is
that the Egyptians had been here before Solomon's people ever set a
foot on it. If this isn't Egyptian or Phoenician handiwork, I must say
that it is very like it."

By midday we had advanced sufficiently down the mountain to search the
region where wood was to be met with. First we came to scattered
bushes which grew more and more frequent, till at last we found the
road winding through a vast grove of silver trees similar to those
which are to be seen on the slopes of Table Mountain at Cape Town. I
had never before met with them in all my wanderings, except at the
Cape, and their appearance here astonished me greatly.

"Ah!" said Good, surveying these shining-leaved trees with evident
enthusiasm, "here is lots of wood, let us stop and cook some dinner; I
have about digested that raw heart."

Nobody objected to this, so leaving the road we made our way to a
stream which was babbling away not far off, and soon had a goodly fire
of dry boughs blazing. Cutting off some substantial hunks from the
flesh of the /inco/ which we had brought with us, we proceeded to
toast them on the end of sharp sticks, as one sees the Kafirs do, and
ate them with relish. After filling ourselves, we lit our pipes and
gave ourselves up to enjoyment that, compared with the hardships we
had recently undergone, seemed almost heavenly.

The brook, of which the banks were clothed with dense masses of a
gigantic species of maidenhair fern interspersed with feathery tufts
of wild asparagus, sung merrily at our side, the soft air murmured
through the leaves of the silver trees, doves cooed around, and
bright-winged birds flashed like living gems from bough to bough. It
was a Paradise.

The magic of the place combined with an overwhelming sense of dangers
left behind, and of the promised land reached at last, seemed to charm
us into silence. Sir Henry and Umbopa sat conversing in a mixture of
broken English and Kitchen Zulu in a low voice, but earnestly enough,
and I lay, with my eyes half shut, upon that fragrant bed of fern and
watched them.

Presently I missed Good, and I looked to see what had become of him.
Soon I observed him sitting by the bank of the stream, in which he had
been bathing. He had nothing on but his flannel shirt, and his natural
habits of extreme neatness having reasserted themselves, he was
actively employed in making a most elaborate toilet. He had washed his
gutta-percha collar, had thoroughly shaken out his trousers, coat and
waistcoat, and was now folding them up neatly till he was ready to put
them on, shaking his head sadly as he scanned the numerous rents and
tears in them, which naturally had resulted from our frightful
journey. Then he took his boots, scrubbed them with a handful of fern,
and finally rubbed them over with a piece of fat, which he had
carefully saved from the /inco/ meat, till they looked, comparatively
speaking, respectable. Having inspected them judiciously through his
eye-glass, he put the boots on and began a fresh operation. From a
little bag that he carried he produced a pocket-comb in which was
fixed a tiny looking-glass, and in this he surveyed himself.
Apparently he was not satisfied, for he proceeded to do his hair with
great care. Then came a pause whilst he again contemplated the effect;
still it was not satisfactory. He felt his chin, on which the
accumulated scrub of a ten days' beard was flourishing.

"Surely," thought I, "he is not going to try to shave." But so it was.
Taking the piece of fat with which he had greased his boots, Good
washed it thoroughly in the stream. Then diving again into the bag he
brought out a little pocket razor with a guard to it, such as are
bought by people who are afraid of cutting themselves, or by those
about to undertake a sea voyage. Then he rubbed his face and chin
vigorously with the fat and began. Evidently it proved a painful
process, for he groaned very much over it, and I was convulsed with
inward laughter as I watched him struggling with that stubbly beard.
It seemed so very odd that a man should take the trouble to shave
himself with a piece of fat in such a place and in our circumstances.
At last he succeeded in getting the hair off the right side of his
face and chin, when suddenly I, who was watching, became conscious of
a flash of light that passed just by his head.

Good sprang up with a profane exclamation (if it had not been a safety
razor he would certainly have cut his throat), and so did I, without
the exclamation, and this was what I saw. Standing not more than
twenty paces from where I was, and ten from Good, were a group of men.
They were very tall and copper-coloured, and some of them wore great
plumes of black feathers and short cloaks of leopard skins; this was
all I noticed at the moment. In front of them stood a youth of about
seventeen, his hand still raised and his body bent forward in the
attitude of a Grecian statue of a spear-thrower. Evidently the flash
of light had been caused by a weapon which he had hurled.

As I looked an old soldier-like man stepped forward out of the group,
and catching the youth by the arm said something to him. Then they
advanced upon us.

Sir Henry, Good, and Umbopa by this time had seized their rifles and
lifted them threateningly. The party of natives still came on. It
struck me that they could not know what rifles were, or they would not
have treated them with such contempt.

"Put down your guns!" I halloed to the others, seeing that our only
chance of safety lay in conciliation. They obeyed, and walking to the
front I addressed the elderly man who had checked the youth.

"Greeting," I said in Zulu, not knowing what language to use. To my
surprise I was understood.

"Greeting," answered the old man, not, indeed, in the same tongue, but
in a dialect so closely allied to it that neither Umbopa nor myself
had any difficulty in understanding him. Indeed, as we afterwards
found out, the language spoken by this people is an old-fashioned form
of the Zulu tongue, bearing about the same relationship to it that the
English of Chaucer does to the English of the nineteenth century.

"Whence come you?" he went on, "who are you? and why are the faces of
three of you white, and the face of the fourth as the face of our
mother's sons?" and he pointed to Umbopa. I looked at Umbopa as he
said it, and it flashed across me that he was right. The face of
Umbopa was like the faces of the men before me, and so was his great
form like their forms. But I had not time to reflect on this
coincidence.

"We are strangers, and come in peace," I answered, speaking very
slowly, so that he might understand me, "and this man is our servant."

"You lie," he answered; "no strangers can cross the mountains where
all things perish. But what do your lies matter?--if ye are strangers
then ye must die, for no strangers may live in the land of the
Kukuanas. It is the king's law. Prepare then to die, O strangers!"

I was slightly staggered at this, more especially as I saw the hands
of some of the men steal down to their sides, where hung on each what
looked to me like a large and heavy knife.

"What does that beggar say?" asked Good.

"He says we are going to be killed," I answered grimly.

"Oh, Lord!" groaned Good; and, as was his way when perplexed, he put
his hand to his false teeth, dragging the top set down and allowing
them to fly back to his jaw with a snap. It was a most fortunate move,
for next second the dignified crowd of Kukuanas uttered a simultaneous
yell of horror, and bolted back some yards.

"What's up?" said I.

"It's his teeth," whispered Sir Henry excitedly. "He moved them. Take
them out, Good, take them out!"

He obeyed, slipping the set into the sleeve of his flannel shirt.

In another second curiosity had overcome fear, and the men advanced
slowly. Apparently they had now forgotten their amiable intention of
killing us.

"How is it, O strangers," asked the old man solemnly, "that this fat
man (pointing to Good, who was clad in nothing but boots and a flannel
shirt, and had only half finished his shaving), whose body is clothed,
and whose legs are bare, who grows hair on one side of his sickly face
and not on the other, and who wears one shining and transparent eye--
how is it, I ask, that he has teeth which move of themselves, coming
away from the jaws and returning of their own will?"

"Open your mouth," I said to Good, who promptly curled up his lips and
grinned at the old gentleman like an angry dog, revealing to his
astonished gaze two thin red lines of gum as utterly innocent of
ivories as a new-born elephant. The audience gasped.

"Where are his teeth?" they shouted; "with our eyes we saw them."

Turning his head slowly and with a gesture of ineffable contempt, Good
swept his hand across his mouth. Then he grinned again, and lo, there
were two rows of lovely teeth.

Now the young man who had flung the knife threw himself down on the
grass and gave vent to a prolonged howl of terror; and as for the old
gentleman, his knees knocked together with fear.

"I see that ye are spirits," he said falteringly; "did ever man born
of woman have hair on one side of his face and not on the other, or a
round and transparent eye, or teeth which moved and melted away and
grew again? Pardon us, O my lords."

Here was luck indeed, and, needless to say, I jumped at the chance.

"It is granted," I said with an imperial smile. "Nay, ye shall know
the truth. We come from another world, though we are men such as ye;
we come," I went on, "from the biggest star that shines at night."

"Oh! oh!" groaned the chorus of astonished aborigines.

"Yes," I went on, "we do, indeed"; and again I smiled benignly, as I
uttered that amazing lie. "We come to stay with you a little while,
and to bless you by our sojourn. Ye will see, O friends, that I have
prepared myself for this visit by the learning of your language."

"It is so, it is so," said the chorus.

"Only, my lord," put in the old gentleman, "thou hast learnt it very
badly."

I cast an indignant glance at him, and he quailed.

"Now friends," I continued, "ye might think that after so long a
journey we should find it in our hearts to avenge such a reception,
mayhap to strike cold in death the imperious hand that--that, in short
--threw a knife at the head of him whose teeth come and go."

"Spare him, my lords," said the old man in supplication; "he is the
king's son, and I am his uncle. If anything befalls him his blood will
be required at my hands."

"Yes, that is certainly so," put in the young man with great emphasis.

"Ye may perhaps doubt our power to avenge," I went on, heedless of
this by-play. "Stay, I will show you. Here, thou dog and slave
(addressing Umbopa in a savage tone), give me the magic tube that
speaks"; and I tipped a wink towards my express rifle.

Umbopa rose to the occasion, and with something as nearly resembling a
grin as I have ever seen on his dignified face he handed me the gun.

"It is here, O Lord of Lords," he said with a deep obeisance.

Now just before I had asked for the rifle I had perceived a little
/klipspringer/ antelope standing on a mass of rock about seventy yards
away, and determined to risk the shot.

"Ye see that buck," I said, pointing the animal out to the party
before me. "Tell me, is it possible for man born of woman to kill it
from here with a noise?"

"It is not possible, my lord," answered the old man.

"Yet shall I kill it," I said quietly.

The old man smiled. "That my lord cannot do," he answered.

I raised the rifle and covered the buck. It was a small animal, and
one which a man might well be excused for missing, but I knew that it
would not do to miss.

I drew a deep breath, and slowly pressed on the trigger. The buck
stood still as a stone.

"Bang! thud!" The antelope sprang into the air and fell on the rock
dead as a door nail.

A groan of simultaneous terror burst from the group before us.

"If you want meat," I remarked coolly, "go fetch that buck."

The old man made a sign, and one of his followers departed, and
presently returned bearing the /klipspringer/. I noticed with
satisfaction that I had hit it fairly behind the shoulder. They
gathered round the poor creature's body, gazing at the bullet-hole in
consternation.

"Ye see," I said, "I do not speak empty words."

There was no answer.

"If ye yet doubt our power," I went on, "let one of you go stand upon
that rock that I may make him as this buck."

None of them seemed at all inclined to take the hint, till at last the
king's son spoke.

"It is well said. Do thou, my uncle, go stand upon the rock. It is but
a buck that the magic has killed. Surely it cannot kill a man."

The old gentleman did not take the suggestion in good part. Indeed, he
seemed hurt.

"No! no!" he ejaculated hastily, "my old eyes have seen enough. These
are wizards, indeed. Let us bring them to the king. Yet if any should
wish a further proof, let /him/ stand upon the rock, that the magic
tube may speak with him."

There was a most general and hasty expression of dissent.

"Let not good magic be wasted on our poor bodies," said one; "we are
satisfied. All the witchcraft of our people cannot show the like of
this."

"It is so," remarked the old gentleman, in a tone of intense relief;
"without any doubt it is so. Listen, children of the Stars, children
of the shining Eye and the movable Teeth, who roar out in thunder, and
slay from afar. I am Infadoos, son of Kafa, once king of the Kukuana
people. This youth is Scragga."

"He nearly scragged me," murmured Good.

"Scragga, son of Twala, the great king--Twala, husband of a thousand
wives, chief and lord paramount of the Kukuanas, keeper of the great
Road, terror of his enemies, student of the Black Arts, leader of a
hundred thousand warriors, Twala the One-eyed, the Black, the
Terrible."

"So," said I superciliously, "lead us then to Twala. We do not talk
with low people and underlings."

"It is well, my lords, we will lead you; but the way is long. We are
hunting three days' journey from the place of the king. But let my
lords have patience, and we will lead them."

"So be it," I said carelessly; "all time is before us, for we do not
die. We are ready, lead on. But Infadoos, and thou Scragga, beware!
Play us no monkey tricks, set for us no foxes' snares, for before your
brains of mud have thought of them we shall know and avenge. The light
of the transparent eye of him with the bare legs and the half-haired
face shall destroy you, and go through your land; his vanishing teeth
shall affix themselves fast in you and eat you up, you and your wives
and children; the magic tubes shall argue with you loudly, and make
you as sieves. Beware!"

This magnificent address did not fail of its effect; indeed, it might
almost have been spared, so deeply were our friends already impressed
with our powers.

The old man made a deep obeisance, and murmured the words, "/Koom
Koom/," which I afterwards discovered was their royal salute,
corresponding to the /Bayete/ of the Zulus, and turning, addressed his
followers. These at once proceeded to lay hold of all our goods and
chattels, in order to bear them for us, excepting only the guns, which
they would on no account touch. They even seized Good's clothes, that,
as the reader may remember, were neatly folded up beside him.

He saw and made a dive for them, and a loud altercation ensued.

"Let not my lord of the transparent Eye and the melting Teeth touch
them," said the old man. "Surely his slave shall carry the things."

"But I want to put 'em on!" roared Good, in nervous English.

Umbopa translated.

"Nay, my lord," answered Infadoos, "would my lord cover up his
beautiful white legs (although he is so dark Good has a singularly
white skin) from the eyes of his servants? Have we offended my lord
that he should do such a thing?"

Here I nearly exploded with laughing; and meanwhile one of the men
started on with the garments.

"Damn it!" roared Good, "that black villain has got my trousers."

"Look here, Good," said Sir Henry; "you have appeared in this country
in a certain character, and you must live up to it. It will never do
for you to put on trousers again. Henceforth you must exist in a
flannel shirt, a pair of boots, and an eye-glass."

"Yes," I said, "and with whiskers on one side of your face and not on
the other. If you change any of these things the people will think
that we are impostors. I am very sorry for you, but, seriously, you
must. If once they begin to suspect us our lives will not be worth a
brass farthing."

"Do you really think so?" said Good gloomily.

"I do, indeed. Your 'beautiful white legs' and your eye-glass are now
/the/ features of our party, and as Sir Henry says, you must live up
to them. Be thankful that you have got your boots on, and that the air
is warm."

Good sighed, and said no more, but it took him a fortnight to become
accustomed to his new and scant attire.