good-looking fellow--under forty, I should say--with a Jewish face,
dark, piercing eyes, and a black, pointed beard. They were engaged
in examining a heap of gold beads and bangles, which lay on the table
between them. As I was about to speak, the black-bearded man heard or
caught sight of us, and seizing a rifle that leaned against the table,
swung round and covered me.

"'For God's sake don't shoot, Jacob,' said the old man; 'they are
English.'

"'Best dead, any way,' answered the other, in a soft voice, with a
slight foreign accent, 'we don't want spies or thieves here.'

"'We are neither, but I can shoot as well as you, friend,' I remarked,
for by this time my rifle was on him.

"Then he thought better of it, and dropped his gun, and we explained
that we were merely on an archæological expedition. The end of it was
that we became capital friends, though neither of us could cotton much
to Mr. Jacob--I forget his other name. He struck me as too handy with
his rifle, and was, I gathered, an individual with a mysterious and
rather lurid past. To cut a long story short, when he found out that
we had no intention of poaching, your father, for it was he, told us
frankly that they were treasure-hunting, having got hold of some
story about a vast store of gold which had been hidden away there by
Portuguese two or three centuries before. Their trouble was, however,
that the Makalanga, who lived in the fortress, which was called
Bambatse, would not allow them to dig, because they said the place was
haunted, and if they did so it would bring bad luck to their tribe."