“Who was that doll, Zikali?”

“Nay, ask me not.  Perhaps it was Nombe, perhaps another.  I have forgotten.  I am very old and my memory begins to play me strange tricks.  Still I recollect that she was a good doll, so like a dead woman called Mameena that I could scarcely have known them apart.  Ah! that was a great game I played in the Vale of Bones, was it not, Macumazahn?”

“Yes, Zikali, yet I do not understand why it was played.”

“Being so young you still have the impatience of youth, Macumazahn, although your hair grows white.  Wait a while and you will understand all.  Well, you lay that night on the topmost rock of Isandhlwana, and there you saw and heard strange things.  You heard the rest of the white soldiers come and lie down to rest among their dead brothers, and depart again unharmed.  Oh! what fools are these Zulu generals nowadays.  They send out an impi to attack men behind walls, spears against rifles, and are defeated.  Had they kept that impi to fall on the rest of the English when they walked into the trap, not a man of your people would have been left alive.  Would that have happened in the time of Chaka?”

“I think not, Zikali.  Still I am glad that it did happen.”

“I think not too, Macumazahn, but small men, small wit.  Also like you I am glad that it did not happen, since it is the Zulus I hate, not the English who have now learned a lesson and will not be caught again.  Oh! many a captain in Zululand is to-day flat as a pricked bladder, and even their victory, as they call it, cost them dear.  For, mind you, Macumazahn, for every white man they killed two of them died.  So, so!  In the morning you left the hill—­do not look astonished, Macumazahn.  Perhaps those captains on the rock beneath you let you go for their own purposes, or because they were commanded, for though weak I can still lift a stone or two, Macumazahn, and afterwards told me all about it.  Then you found yourself alone among the dead, like the last man in the world, Macumazahn, and that dog at your side, also a horse came to you.  Perhaps I sent them, perhaps it was a chance.  Who knows?  Not I myself, for as I have said, my memory has grown so bad.  That was your first shock, Macumazahn, the shock of standing alone among the dead like the last man in the world.  You felt it, did you not?”

“As I hope I shall never feel anything again.  It nearly drove me mad,” I answered.

“Very nearly indeed, though I have felt worse things and only laughed, as I would tell you, had I the time.  Well, then the sun struck you, for at this season of the year it is very hot in those valleys for a white man with no covering to his head, and you went quite mad, though fortunately the dog and the horse remained as Heaven had made them.  That was the second shock.  Then the storm burst and the lightning fell.  It ran down the rifle that you still carried, Macumazahn.  I will show