indignantly.

"What was the good, Baas? You were hunting gold then, not ivory. Why
should I make you unhappy, and waste my own breath by talking about
beautiful things which were far beyond the reach of either of us, far as
that sky?"

"Don't ask fool's questions but tell me what you know, Hans. Tell me at
once."

"This, Baas: When we were up at Beza-Town after we came back from
killing the gorilla-god, and the Baas Stephen your friend lay sick, and
there was nothing else to do, I talked with everyone I could find worth
talking to, and they were not many, Baas. But there was one very old
woman who was not of the Mazitu race and whose husband and children
were all dead, but whom the people in the town looked up to and feared
because she was wise and made medicines out of herbs, and told fortunes.
I used to go to see her. She was quite blind, Baas, and fond of talking
with me--which shows how wise she was. I told her all about the Pongo
gorilla-god, of which already she knew something. When I had done she
said that he was as nothing compared with a certain god that she
had seen in her youth, seven tens of years ago, when she became
marriageable. I asked her for that story, and she spoke it thus:

"Far away to the north and east live a people called the Kendah, who are
ruled over by a sultan. They are a very great people and inhabit a most
fertile country. But all round their country the land is desolate and
manless, peopled only by game, for the reason that they will suffer none
to dwell there. That is why nobody knows anything about them: he that
comes across the wilderness into that land is killed and never returns