is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers’ bones.[*] But I know not:  who can know?  My arts cannot pierce so far into the blackness of Time’s night.  A great people were they.  They conquered till none were left to conquer, and then they dwelt at ease within their rocky mountain walls, with their man servants and their maid servants, their minstrels, their sculptors, and their concubines, and traded and quarrelled, and ate and hunted and slept and made merry till their time came.  But come, I will show thee the great pit beneath the cave whereof the writing speaks.  Never shall thine eyes witness such another sight.”

[*] The name of the race Ama-hagger would seem to indicate a curious mingling of races such as might easily have occurred in the neighbourhood of the Zambesi.  The prefix “Ama” is common to the Zulu and kindred races, and signifies “people,” while “hagger” is an Arabic word meaning a stone.  —­Editor.

Accordingly I followed her to a side passage opening out of the main cave, then down a great number of steps, and along an underground shaft which cannot have been less than sixty feet beneath the surface of the rock, and was ventilated by curious borings that ran upward, I know not where.  Suddenly the passage ended, and she halted and bade the mutes hold up the lamps, and, as she had prophesied, I saw a scene such as I was not likely to see again.  We were standing in an enormous pit, or rather on the brink of it, for it went down deeper—­I do not know how much—­than the level on which we stood, and was edged in with a low wall of rock.  So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the space beneath the dome of St. Paul’s in London, and when the lamps were held up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above.  Anything more appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated with the skin still on them, and now, fixed in every conceivable position, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquely horrible caricatures of humanity.  In my astonishment I uttered an ejaculation, and the echoes of my voice, ringing in the vaulted space, disturbed a skull that had been accurately balanced for many thousands of years near the apex of the pile.  Down it came with a run, bounding along merrily towards us, and of course bringing an avalanche of other bones after it, till at last the whole pit rattled with their movement, even as though the skeletons were getting up to greet us.

“Come,” I said, “I have seen enough.  These are the bodies of those who died of the great sickness, is it not so?” I added, as we turned away.