Certain headmen or Indunas, however, were always waiting to pounce on me. Whenever I put my nose out-of-doors they appeared, bowing humbly, and proceeded to take the occasion to instruct me in the history and customs of the Walloo people, till I thought that my boyhood had returned and I was once more reading “Sandford and Merton” and acquiring knowledge through the art of conversation. Those old gentlemen bored me stiff. I tried to get rid of them by taking long walks at a great pace, but they responded nobly, being ready to trot by my side till they dropped, talking, talking, talking. Moreover, if I could outwalk those ancient councillors, the guard of twenty who formed a kind of chorus on these expeditions, were excellent hands with their legs, as an Irishman might say, and never turned a hair. Sometimes they turned me, however, if they thought I was going where I should not, since then half of them would dart ahead and politely bar the way. At length, on the third or fourth day, all the ceremonies were finished and I was summoned into Sabeela’s presence. As Hans said afterwards, it was all very fine. Indeed, I thought it pathetic with its somewhat tawdry conditions of ancient, almost forgotten ceremonial inherited from a highly civilized race that was now sinking into barbarism. There was the Lady Sabeela, very beautiful to see, for she was a lovely woman and grandly dressed in a half-wild fashion, who played the part of a queen and not without dignity, as perhaps her ancestresses had done thousands of years before on some greater stage. Here too were her white-haired attendants or Indunas, the same who bored me out walking, representing the councillors and high officials of forgotten ages. Yet the Queen was no longer a queen; she was merging into the savage chieftainess, as the councillors were into the chattering mob that surrounds such a person in a thousand kraals or towns of Africa. The proceedings, too, were very long, for each of these councillors or elders made a speech in which he repeated all that the others had said before, narrating with variations everything that happened in the land since I had set foot within it, together with fancy accounts of what Hans and I had done upon the island.