第44章

A year mightest thou search and shouldst never find it.It is only used once a year, when the herds of cattle that have been fattening on the slopes of the mountain, and on this plain, are driven into the space within.""And does _i_ She _i_ live there always?" I asked, "or does she come at times without the mountain?""Nay, my son, where she is, there she is!"By now we were well on to the great plain, and I was examining with delight the varied beauty of its semi-tropical flowers and trees, the latter of which grew singly, or at most in clumps of three or four, much of the timber being of large size, and belonging apparently to a variety of evergreen oak.There were also many palms, some of them more than one hundred feet high, and the largest and most beautiful tree-ferns that I ever saw, about which hung clouds of jewelled honey-suckers and great-winged butterflies.

Wandering about among the trees or crouching in the long and leathered grass were all varieties of game, from rhinoceroses down.I saw rhinoceros, buffalo (a large herd), eland, quagga, and sable antelope, the most beautiful of all the bucks, not to mention many smaller varieties of game, and three ostriches which scudded away at our approach like white drift before a gale.So plentiful was the game that at last I could stand it no longer.I had a single-barrel sporting Martini with me in the litter, the "Express" being too cumbersome, and, espying a beautiful fat eland rubbing himself under one of the oak like trees, I jumped out of the litter and proceeded to creep as near to him as I could.He let me come within eighty yards, and then turned his head and stared at me, preparatory to running away.I lifted and taking him about midway down the shoulder, for he was side on to me, fired.Inever made a cleaner shot or a better kill in all my small experience, for the great buck sprang right up into the air and fell dead.The bearers, who had all halted to see the performance, gave a murmur of surprise, an unwonted compliment from these sullen people, who never appear to be surprised at anything, and a party of the guard at once ran off to cut the animal up.As for myself, though I was longing to have a look at him, I sauntered back to my litter as though I had been in the habit of killing eland all my life, feeling that I had gone up several degrees in the estimation of the Amahagger, who looked on the whole thing as a very high-class manifestation of witchcraft.As a matter of fact, however, I had never seen an eland in a wild state before.Billali received me with enthusiasm.

"It is wonderful, my son the Baboon," he cried;"wonderful! Thou art a very great man, though so ugly.

Had I not seen, surely I would never have believed.

And thou sayest that thou wilt teach me to slay in this fashion?""Certainly, my father," I said, airily; "it is nothing."But all the same I firmly made up my mind that when "my father" Billali began to fire I would without fall lie down or take refuge behind a tree.

After this little incident nothing happened of any note till about an hour and a half before sundown, when we arrived beneath the shadow of the towering volcanic mass that I have already described.It is quite impossible for me to describe its grim grandeur as it appeared to me while my patient bearers toiled along the bed of the ancient watercourse towards the spot where the rich brown clad cliff shot up from precipice to precipice till its crown lost itself in cloud.All I can say is that it almost awed me by the intensity of its lonesome and most solemn greatness.

On we went up the bright and sunny slope, till at last the creeping shadows from above swallowed up its brightness, and presently we began to pass through a cutting hewn in the living rock.Deeper and deeper grew this marvellous work, which must, I should say, have employed thousands of men for many years.Indeed, how it was ever executed at all without the aid of blasting powder or dynamite I cannot to this day imagine.It is and must remain one of the mysteries of that wild land.I can only suppose that these cuttings and the vast caves that had been hollowed out of the rocks they pierced were the State undertakings of the people of Ko^r, who lived here in the dim lost ages of the world, and, as in the case of the Egyptian monuments, were executed by the forced labor of tens of thousands of captives, carried on through an indefinite number of centuries.But who were the people?