[Illustration] Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard Contents DEDICATION AUTHOR’S NOTE CHAPTER I. ALLAN QUATERMAIN HEARS OF MAMEENA CHAPTER II. THE MOONSHINE OF ZIKALI CHAPTER III. THE BUFFALO WITH THE CLEFT HORN CHAPTER IV. MAMEENA CHAPTER V. TWO BUCKS AND THE DOE CHAPTER VI. THE AMBUSH CHAPTER VII. SADUKO BRINGS THE MARRIAGE GIFT CHAPTER VIII. THE KING’S DAUGHTER CHAPTER IX. ALLAN RETURNS TO ZULULAND CHAPTER X. THE SMELLING-OUT CHAPTER XI. THE SIN OF UMBELAZI CHAPTER XII. PANDA’S PRAYER CHAPTER XIII. UMBELAZI THE FALLEN CHAPTER XIV. UMBEZI AND THE BLOOD ROYAL CHAPTER XV. MAMEENA CLAIMS THE KISS CHAPTER XVI. MAMEENA—MAMEENA—MAMEENA! 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[1]—when you wrote to me that it was animated by the true Zulu spirit. [1] “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 of the Transvaal, from their hereditary trade of war, to match himself against the British strength. I learned it all by personal observation in the ‘seventies, or from the lips of the great Shepstone, my chief and friend, and from my colleagues Osborn, Fynney, Clarke and others, every one of them long since “gone down.” Perhaps it may be as well that this is so, at any rate in the case of one who desires to write of the Zulus as a reigning nation, which now they have ceased to be, and to try to show them as they were, in all their superstitious madness and bloodstained grandeur.