That was not all, for the creature seemed to be laughing cruelly, and the drawing showed why it laughed. One of its feet was set upon the body of a man into which the great claw was driven deep. One of its hands held the head of the man, that evidently it had just twisted from the body. The other hand grasped by the hair a living naked girl badly drawn, as though this detail had not interested the artist, whom apparently it was about to drag away. “Isn’t it a pretty picture, Baas?” sniggered Hans. “Now the Baas will not say that I tell lies, no, not for quite a week.” CHAPTER III. THE OPENER-OF-ROADS I stared and stared, then was overcome with faintness and sat down upon the ground. I see you laughing at me, young man [this was addressed to me, the recorder of the tale] who no doubt have already decided that this drawing was the work of some imaginative Bushman who had gone mad and set down upon the rock the hellish dream of a mind diseased. Of course, that was the conclusion I came to myself next morning, though afterwards I changed my opinion, but at the time it did not strike me like that. The place was lonesome and eerie, a horrible place with the pit full of bones near by; heavily silent also except for a distant hyena or jackal howling at the moon, and I had gone through some trials that day—the passage of the death-pit, for instance, which reminded me of the oubliettes in ancient Norman castles that I have read of down which prisoners were hurled to doom. Also, as you may have observed, even in your short career, moonlight differs from sun-light and we, or some of us, are much more affected by horrible things at night than we are by day. At any rate, I sat down because I felt faint and thought that I was going to be ill. “What is it, Baas?” queried the observant Hans, still mocking. “If you want to be sick, Baas, please don’t mind me, for I’ll turn my back. I remember that I was sick myself when first I saw Heu-Heu—just there,” he added reminiscently, pointing to a certain spot. “Why do you call that thing ‘Heu-Heu,’ Hans?” I asked, trying to master the reflex action of my interior arrangements. “Because that is his nice name, Baas, given him by his Mammie when he was little, perhaps.” (Here I nearly _was_ sick, the idea of that creature with a mother almost finished me—like the sight and smell of a bit of fat bacon in a gale at sea.) “How do you know that?” I gurgled.