Indeed now, when they had been continuously journeying for nearly three months since they had turned their backs upon the friendly Makolo nation, and were daily receiving fresh evidence that they were drawing very near to the goal of their long pilgrimage, it was by the merest chance, the most extraordinary caprice of the king into whose country they had penetrated, that they were permitted to live and accorded freedom to pursue their journey unmolested. For the savages among whom they now found themselves seemed to be possessed of an extraordinarily virulent animus, or prejudice--call it which you will--against whiteskins, due, as the travellers eventually discovered, to the fact that a nation of whites inhabited the adjacent territory, between whom and the blacks, who surrounded them on all sides, an implacable enmity had existed as far back as history or even legend extended. From whence those white people had come, or how long they had inhabited the land of which they held such stubborn possession, there was no record to tell; but the grievance of the blacks seemed to consist in the fact that the interlopers--as they chose to regard them--occupied the whole of a peculiarly rich and fertile tract of country from which, though they were relatively few in number, they resolutely refused to be dislodged; while the surrounding territory, occupied by the blacks, was comparatively poor, sterile, and ill-watered, affording an ever more scanty subsistence to the steadily growing population. Also there was a widespread belief, amounting to conviction among the blacks, that their white neighbours were wont to punish such attempts as were made from time to time to drive them out, by putting all prisoners to death in a variety of peculiarly hideous forms--although it was by no means clear how this belief arose, since no prisoners ever returned to throw any light upon the subject.