Kalingalunga paused at the brink and said to his companions in a low, awestruck voice, “Milmeridien.”

The glade was full of graves, some of them fresh, glittering with bright red earth under the cool, green acacias, others richly veiled with golden moss more or less according to their age; and in the recesses of the grove peeped smoother traces of mortality, mossy mounds a thousand years old, and others far more ancient still, now mere excrescences of green, known to be graves only by the light of that immense gradation of times and dates and epochs.

The floor of the open glade was laid out as a vast parterre—­each grave a little flower-bed, round, square, oval, or rhomboid; and all round each bed flowed in fine and graceful curves little paths too narrow for a human foot.  Primeval tradition had placed them there that spirits might have free passage to visit all the mighty dead.  For here reposed no vulgar corpses.  Here, their heads near the surface, but their feet deep in earth, sat the great hunters and warriors of every age of the race of Kalingalunga, once a great nation, though now a failing tribe.  They sat there this many a day, their weapons in their hands, ready to start up whenever the great signal should come, and hunt once more, but without fatigue, in woods boundless as the sea, and with bodily frames no longer mortal, to knock and be knocked on the head, ad infinitum.

Simple and benign creed!

A cry of delight burst from the white men, and they were going to spread themselves over the garden of the dead.

The savage checked them with horror.

“Nobody walk there while him alive,” said he.  “Now you follow me and not speak any words at all, or Kalingalunga will leave you in the bush.—­Hush!”

The savage paused, that even the echo of his remonstrance might die well away before he traversed the garden.  He then bowed his head down upon his breast in a set manner, and so remained quiet a few seconds.  In that same attitude he started and walked slowly by the verge of the glade, keeping carefully clear of the graves, and never raising his head.  About half way he stopped and reverently scattered the ashes of the wambiloa upon three graves that lay near the edge, then forward—­silent, downcast, reverential.

“Mors omnibus est communis!” The white men, even down to Jem, understood and sympathized with Kalingalunga.  In this garden of the dead of all ages they felt their common humanity, and followed their black brother silent and awestruck.  Melted, too, by the sweet and sacred sorrow of this calm scene; for here Death seemed to relax his frown, and the dead but to rest from trouble and toil, mourned by gentle, tender trees; and in truth it was a beautiful thought of these savage men to have given their dead for companions those rare and drooping acacias, that bowed themselves and loosed their hair so like fair women abandoned to sorrow over the beloved and dead, and night and morning swept with their dewy eyelashes the pillows of the brave. Requiescant in pace!—­resurgant in pacem! For I wish them better than they wished themselves.