“How, unless it be broken, Macumazahn?  If Heddana departs and leaves her, she will go mad, and accompany her she cannot, for her Spirit dwells here,” and he tapped his own breast.  “It would pull her back again and she would become a great trouble to me, for then that Spirit of hers would not suffer me to sleep, with its continual startings in search of what it had lost, and its returnings empty-handed.  Well, have no fear, for at the worst the bowl can be broken and the blood poured upon the earth, as I have broken finer bowls than this before; had I all the bits of them they would make a heap so high, Macumazahn!” and he held out his hand on a level with his head, a gesture that made my back creep.  “I will tell her this and it may keep her quiet for a while.  Of poison you need not be afraid, since unlike mine, her Spirit hates it.  Poison is not one of its weapons as it is with mine.  But of spells, beware, for her Spirit has some which are very powerful.”

Now I jumped up, filled with indignation, saying—­

“I do not believe in Nombe’s spells, and in any case how am I to guard against them?”

“If you do not believe there is no need to guard, and if you do believe, then it is for you to find out how to guard, Macumazahn.  Oh!  I could tell you the story of a white teacher who did not believe and would not guard—­but never mind, never mind.  Good-bye, Macumazahn, I will speak with Nombe.  Ask her for a lock of her hair to wear upon your heart after she has enchanted it.  The charm is good against spells.  O-ho—­Oho-o!  What fools we are, white and black together!  That is what Cetewayo is thinking to-day.”

After this Nombe became much more agreeable.  That is to say she was very polite, her smile was more fixed and her eyes more unfathomable than ever.  Evidently Zikali had spoken to her and she had listened.  Yet to tell the truth my distrust of this handsome young woman grew deeper day by day.  I recognized that there was a great gulf between her and the normal, that she was a creature fashioned by Zikali who had trained her as a gardener trains a tree, nay, who had done more, who had grafted some foreign growth of exotic and unnatural spiritualism on to her primitive nature.  The nature remained the same, but the graft or grafts bore strange flowers and fruit, unholy flowers and poisonous fruit.  Therefore she was not to blame—­sometimes I wonder whether in this curious world, could one see their past and their future, anybody is to blame for anything—­but this did not make her the less dangerous.

Some talks I had with her only increased my apprehensions, for I found that in a way she had no conscience.  Life, she told me, was but a dream, and all its laws as evolved by man were but illusions.  The real life was elsewhere.  There was the distant lake on which the flower of our true existence floated.  Without this unseen lake of supernatural water the flower could not float; indeed there would be no flower.  Moreover, the flower did not matter; sometimes it would have this shape and colour, sometimes that.  It was but a thing destined to grow and bloom and rot, and during its day to be ugly or to be beautiful, to smell sweet or ill, as it might chance, and ultimately to be absorbed back into the general water of Life.