by H. RIDER HAGGARD




DEDICATION


Dear Mr. Stuart,

For twenty years, I believe I am right in saying, you, as Assistant
Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, and in other offices, have been
intimately acquainted with the Zulu people. Moreover, you are one of
the few living men who have made a deep and scientific study of their
language, their customs and their history. So I confess that I was the
more pleased after you were so good as to read this tale--the second
book of the epic of the vengeance of Zikali, "the
Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born," and of the fall of the House of
Senzangakona*--when you wrote to me that it was animated by the true
Zulu spirit.

[*--"Marie" was the first. The third and final act in the drama is yet
to come.].

I must admit that my acquaintance with this people dates from a period
which closed almost before your day. What I know of them I gathered at
the time when Cetewayo, of whom my volume tells, was in his glory,
previous to the evil hour in which he found himself driven by the
clamour of his regiments, cut off, as they were, through the annexation