sweet, and for the rest--well, he who had been so near to death, was
escaped for an hour from that gloomy home of bloodshed and superstition,
and saw God's sky again.

This journey was the first of many. Every day the litters were waiting
and they visited some new place, although into the town itself they
never went. Moreover, if they passed through outlying villages, though
Alan was forced to wear his mask, their inhabitants had been warned to
absent themselves, so that they saw no one. The crops were left untended
and the cattle and sheep lowed hungrily in their kraals. On certain
days, at Alan's request, they were taken to the spots where the gold was
found in the gravel bed of an almost dry stream that during the rains
was a torrent.

He descended from the litter and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie,
dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found
several nuggets. Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge
quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past
ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold.
Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds
of thousands of pounds capital with which this unique proposition might
have been floated. Afterwards they were carried to the places where
the gems were found, stuck about in the clay, like plums in a pudding,
though none ever sought them now. But all these things interested the
Asika not at all.

"What is the good of gold," she asked of Alan, "except to make things
of, or the bright stones except to play with? What is the good of
anything except food to eat and power and wisdom that can open the
secret doors of knowledge, of things seen and things unseen, and love