Beside him, waking and sleeping, there remained two guards, so that in Muene-Motapa's capital there was a lucid riddle, "What is it that casts three shadows?" Those two prehistoric warriors were aware of an incomprehensible great value locked up in the captive's mind; yet at his first false movement they would have slaughtered him, destroying cheerfully, like many others before them, what they could never hope to understand. However, they were kind to him, holding palm leaves over his head when he crossed the courtyards in the blaze of the sun, cooling his wrists when he fell ill with fever, and at night, if they spoke to each other across his body, keeping their voices low so as not to break his sleep. King Muene-Motapa had said to them long ago: "If he escapes, you shall be beaten to death with sticks; but if he tells me that you have not treated him respectfully, soldier ants shall eat you alive." For despite his chains, Lawrence Teck was the chosen friend of the king. Muene-Motapa had been fond of him even before the drunken riot in which he got his wounds. This friendship had then become a proprietary emotion, a compound of affection, remorse, the fear of revenge, and even a sort of proselytizing zeal mixed up with self-interest. Muene-Motapa hoped that in time his prisoner would renounce all desire for the white world, embrace the beliefs and habits of the Mambava, become a subtle counselor in diplomacy as well as in wars of conquest. In short, those tales of the lands beyond these forests--the wiles of Islam, the methods by which the Europeans were eating up Africa--had revived in the king the incoherent and grandiose dreams of his youth. In this captive, whom he would some day make his brother, co-priest, and fellow general, he had found the knowledge to supplement his force, and make himself invincible. So, night after night he repeated the same plea, sitting in the royal pavilion, across the fire from the white man whose guards had been sent out of doors. Muene-Motapa was tall, muscular, bold of gesture and fierce of face. His word was life and death. Day and night he was surrounded by chiefs, councilors, wizards, and royal ladies who roared with laughter when he smiled, gnashed their teeth when he frowned, accompanied his every comment with moans of admiration and a soft snapping of their fingers. They were round him now, aligned against the wattled walls, behind the film of wood smoke; breathlessly awaiting the sound of his deep voice. He began, in a chanting tone, to rehearse the past glories of the blacks. He spoke of that great ancestor of his, that other Muene-Motapa, whose kingdom had extended from the country of the Bushmen to the Indian Ocean, and from Nyasaland to Delagoa Bay. Then the white men had come.