“Bosh!” I exclaimed, but internally I had my doubts. I knew something of this fetish business, although I believed it to be the greatest of rubbish, I was sure that it is extremely dangerous rubbish. The secret soul of man, especially of savage, or primitive and untaught man, or the sub-conscious self, or whatever you choose to call it, is a terrible entity when brought into action by the hereditary superstitions that are born in his blood. In nine cases out of ten, if the victim of those superstitions is told with the accustomed ceremonies by the oracle of the god or devil from which they flow, that he will die, he does die. Nothing kills him, but he commits a kind of moral suicide. As Hans had said—Fear makes him soft. Then some kind of nervous disease penetrates his system and at the appointed hour withers up his physical life and causes him to pass away. Such, as it proved, was to be the fate of that Apollo-like person, the unhappy Issicore. CHAPTER XV. SABEELA’S FAREWELL Now of this story there is little left to tell, and as it is very late and I see that you are all yawning, my friends [this was not true, for we were deeply interested, especially over the moral or spiritual problem of Issicore], I will cut that little as short as I can. It shall be a mere footnote. After we had eaten that morning, we went to see Sabeela, whom we found very agitated. This was natural enough, considering all she had gone through, as after mental strain and the passing of great perils, a nervous reaction invariably follows. Also, in a sudden and terrible fashion, she had lost her father, to whom she was attached. But the real cause of her distress was different. Issicore, it seemed, had been taken very ill. Nobody knew what was the matter with him, but Sabeela was persuaded that he had been poisoned. She begged me to visit him at once and cure him—a request that made me indignant. I explained to her that I was no authority on their native poisons, if he suffered from anything of the sort, and had few medicines with me, the only one of which that dealt with poisons was an antidote to snake bites. However, as she was very insistent, I said that I would go and see what I could do, which would probably be nothing. So, together with Hans, I was conducted by some of the old headmen, or councillors of the Walloo, such people as in Zululand we should call _Indunas,_ to the house of Issicore, a rather fine building of its sort at the other end of the town. We walked by the road that ran along the edge of the lake, which gave us an opportunity to observe the island, or rather what had been the island.