him seems sufficiently curious to be worthy of telling. The People of
the Mist of his adventure story worship a sacred crocodile to which they
make sacrifice, but in the original draft of the book this crocodile was
a snake--_monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens_. A friend of the writer,
an African explorer of great experience who read that draft, suggested
that the snake was altogether too unprecedented and impossible.
Accordingly, also at his suggestion, a crocodile was substituted.
Scarcely was this change effected, however, when Mr. R. T. Coryndon, the
slayer of almost the last white rhinoceros, published in the _African
Review_ of February 17, 1894, an account of a huge and terrific serpent
said to exist in the Dichwi district of Mashonaland, that in many
particulars resembled the snake of the story, whose prototype, by the
way, really lives and is adored as a divinity by certain natives in the
remote province of Chiapas in Mexico. Still, the tale being in type, the
alteration was suffered to stand. But now, if the _Zoutpansberg Review_
may be believed, the author can take credit for his crocodile also,
since that paper states that in the course of the recent campaign
against Malaboch, a chief living in the north of the Transvaal, his
fetish or god was captured, and that god, a crocodile fashioned in wood,
to which offerings were made. Further, this journal says that among
these people (as with the ancient Egyptians), the worship of the
crocodile is a recognised cult. Also it congratulates the present writer
on his intimate acquaintance with the more secret manifestations of
African folklore and beast worship. He must disclaim the compliment in
this instance as, when engaged in inventing the 'People of the Mist,'
he was totally ignorant that any of the Bantu tribes reverenced either
snake or crocodile divinities. But the coincidence is strange, and once
more shows, if further examples of the fact are needed, how impotent
are the efforts of imagination to vie with hidden truths--even with the
hidden truths of this small and trodden world.