When we were filled I lit my pipe and began to talk with Hans, whom the grog had made loquacious and therefore interesting. He asked me how old the cave was, and I told him that it was as old as the mountains of the Berg. He answered that he had thought so because there were footprints stamped in the rock floor farther down it, and turned to stone, which were not made by any beasts that he had ever heard of or seen, which footprints he would show me on the morrow if I cared to look at them. Further, that there were queer bones lying about, also turned to stone, that he thought must have belonged to giants. He believed that he could find some of these bones when the sun shone into the cave in the early morning. Then I explained to Hans and the Kaffirs how once, thousands of thousands of years ago, before there were any men in the world, great creatures had lived there, huge elephants and reptiles as large as a hundred crocodiles made into one, and, as I had been told, enormous apes, much bigger than any gorilla. They were very interested, and Hans said that it was quite true about the apes, since he had seen a picture of one of them, or of a giant that looked like an ape. “Where?” I asked. “In a book?” “No, Baas, here in this cave. The Bushmen made it ten thousand years ago.” By which he meant at some indefinite time in the past. Now I bethought me of a fabulous creature called the _Ngoloko_ which was said to inhabit an undefined area of swamps on the East Coast and elsewhere. This animal, in which, I may add, I did not in the least believe, for I set it down as a native bogey, was supposed to be at least eight feet high, to be covered with gray hair and to have a claw in the place of toes. My chief authority for it was a strange old Portuguese hunter whom I had once known, who swore that he had seen its footprints in the mud, also that it had killed one of his men and twisted the head off his body. I asked Hans if he had ever heard of it. He replied that he had, under another name, that of _Milhoy,_ I think, but that the devil painted in the cave was larger than that. Now I thought that he was pitching me a yarn, as natives will, and said that if so he had better show me the picture forthwith. “Best wait until the sun shines in the morning, Baas,” he replied, “for then the light will be good. Also this devil is not nice to look at at night.” “Show it me,” I repeated with asperity; “we have lanterns from the wagon.”