Then there was the story of the town full of petrified men and animals. This must be either true or false, since it lacked ghostly complications. Although I had never heard of anything of the sort, there might be such a place, and if so, it would be splendid to be its discoverer. Oh, of what was I thinking? Zikali’s yarn must be nonsense, and rank fiction. Yet it reminded me of something that I had heard in my youth, which for a long while I could not recall. At last, in a flash, it came back to me. My old father, who was a learned scholar, had a book of Grecian legends, and one of these about a lady called Andromeda, the daughter of a king who, in obedience to popular pressure and in order to avert calamities from his country, tied her up to a rock, to be carried off by a monster that rose out of the sea. Then a magically aided hero of the name of Perseus arrived at the critical moment, killed the monster and took away the lady to be his wife. Why, this Heu-Heu story was the same thing over again. The maiden was tied to a rock; the monster came out of the sea, or rather, the lake, and carried her off, whereby calamities were duly averted. So similar was it, indeed, that I began to wonder whether it were not an echo of the ancient myth that somehow had found its way into Africa. Only hitherto there had been no Perseus in Heuheua Land. That rôle, apparently, was reserved for me. And if so, what should I do with the maiden? Restore her to a grateful family, I suppose, for certainly I had no intention of marrying her. Oh, I was growing silly with thinking! I would go to sleep; I _would,_ I _wo——_ A minute or two later, or so it seemed, I woke up thinking, not of Andromeda, but of the prophet Samuel, and for a while wondered what on earth could have put this austere patriarch and priest into my head. Then, being a great student of the Old Testament, I remembered that autocratic seer’s indignation when he heard the lowing of the oxen which Saul spared from the general “eating up” of the Amalekites, as the Zulus would describe it, by divine command. (What was the use of cutting the throats of all that good stock, personally, I could never understand.) Well, in my ears also was the lowing of oxen, which, of course, formed the connecting link. I marvelled what they could be, for our own were grazing at a little distance, and poked my head out under the wagon-hood to perceive a really beautiful team of trek cattle, eighteen of them, for there were two spare beasts, which had just been driven up to my camp by two strange Kaffirs. Then, of course, I remembered about the oxen which Zikali promised to sell me upon easy terms, or under certain circumstances to give me, and thought to myself that in this matter, at any rate, he had proved a wizard of his word.