It was grey dawn when she awoke, but her awakening was startling, for it was brought about by a loud harsh shout--almost in her ear. Nidia sprang to her feet, trembling with terror. Several great dark shapes fled to the rocks just overhanging her resting-place, and, gaining them, faced round again, uttering their harsh, angry shout. Baboons? Could they be? Nidia had seen here and there a dejected looking baboon or two chained to a post; but such had nothing in common with these great fierce brutes up there, barely twenty yards distant, which skipped hither and thither, champing their great tusks and barking savagely. One old male of enormous size, outlined against the sky, on the apex of a cone, looked as large as a lion. Others came swarming down the rocks; evil-looking horrors, repulsive as so many gigantic spiders. Wild-eyed with fear, Nidia snatched up a blanket, and ran towards them, waving it, and shouting. They retreated helter-skelter, but only to skip forward again, mowing and gibbering. Three of the foremost, indeed, great males, would hardly move at all. They squatted almost within springing distance, gnashing their tusks, hideously threatening. Then, as by magic, the whole gnome-like troop wildly fled; but the cause of this change of front was hard and material. "Whizz--Bang--Whack!" came a succession of stones, forcibly hurled, splintering off a rock like a bullet, thudding hard upon simian ribs. Yelling and jabbering, the whole crew skipped and shoggled up the rocks, and Nidia, with a very wan and scared smile upon her pallid face, turned to welcome her companion and protector--turned, to behold--not John Ames at all, but a burly savage--a tall Matabele warrior, barbarously picturesque in the weird panoply of his martial adornments. CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. TRAPPED. His mind aglow with the recollection of that farewell, his one thought how soon he should be able to return, John Ames strode forth upon his quest, and as he did so it is probable that the whole world could not have produced another human being filled with such a rapturous exaltation as this refugee from a fiendish massacre, hiding for his life in the grim fastnesses of the Matopo Hills. That last look he had discerned in Nidia's eyes, that last pressure of her hands, could mean but one thing, and that the one thing to obtain which he would have laid down his life again and again. She was beginning to care for him. Other little spontaneous acts of cordiality during their enforced exile, had more than once stirred within him this wild hope, yet he had not encouraged himself to entertain it. Such he had of course deemed to be the outcome of their position. Now, however, the scales seemed to fall from his eyes, and he could read into them a very different meaning.