“Not altogether, Macumazahn,” she answered in a pleasant voice.  “That was Zikali, the Mighty Magician, the Counsellor of Kings, the Opener of Roads; he whose birth our grandfathers do not remember; he whose breath causes the trees to be torn out by the roots; he whom Dingaan fears and obeys.”

“Did he cause the Boers to be killed?” I asked.

“Mayhap,” she answered.  “Who am I that I should know of such matters?”

“Are you the woman who was sick whom I was sent to visit?” I asked again.

“Yes, Macumazahn, I was sick, but now I am well and you are sick, for so things go round.  Drink this,” and she handed me a gourd of milk.

“How are you named?” I inquired as I took it.

“Naya is my name,” she replied, “and I am your jailer.  Don’t think that you can escape me, though, Macumazahn, for there are other jailers without who carry spears.  Drink.”

So I drank and bethought me that the draught might be poisoned.  Yet so thirsty was I that I finished it, every drop.

“Now am I a dead man?” I asked, as I put down the gourd.

“No, no, Macumazahn,” she who called herself Naya replied in a soft voice; “not a dead man, only one who will sleep and forget.”

Then I lost count of everything and slept—­for how long I know not.

When I awoke again it was broad daylight; in fact, the sun stood high in the heavens.  Perhaps Naya had put some drug into my milk, or perhaps I had simply slept.  I do not know.  At any rate, I was grateful for that sleep, for without it I think that I should have gone mad.  As it was, when I remembered, which it took me some time to do, for a while I went near to insanity.

I recollect lying there in that hut and wondering how the Almighty could have permitted such a deed as I had seen done.  How could it be reconciled with any theory of a loving and merciful Father?  Those poor Boers, whatever their faults, and they had many, like the rest of us, were in the main good and honest men according to their lights.  Yet they had been doomed to be thus brutally butchered at the nod of a savage despot, their wives widowed, their children left fatherless, or, as it proved in the end, in most cases murdered or orphaned!

The mystery was too great—­great enough to throw off its balance the mind of a young man who had witnessed such a fearsome scene as I have described.

For some days really I think that my reason hung just upon the edge of that mental precipice.  In the end, however, reflection and education, of which I had a certain amount, thanks to my father, came to my aid.  I recalled that such massacres, often on an infinitely larger scale, had happened a thousand times in history, and that still through them, often, indeed, by means of them, civilisation has marched forward, and mercy and peace have kissed each other over the bloody graves of the victims.

Therefore even in my youth and inexperience I concluded that some ineffable purpose was at work through this horror, and that the lives of those poor men which had been thus sacrificed were necessary to that purpose.  This may appear a dreadful and fatalistic doctrine, but it is one that is corroborated in Nature every day, and doubtless the sufferers meet with their compensations in some other state.  Indeed, if it be not so, faith and all the religions are vain.