When, fourteen or fifteen years previously, the first intruders made their way into this district, the story goes that hundreds of the natives, with their wives and children and all their goods and chattels, betook themselves to this inaccessible retreat; and that having died of starvation, their evil spirits survive and render their place of refuge a place of danger. Just as we had contrived to push a little way into the thicket, an idea struck one of my servants that he could be as cunning as his master. Finding that I persevered in my intention, he bethought himself of the bees on the White Nile, and so there rose the shout of “Bees, bees!” from more than one of the party. But they got some stings they hardly looked for: one good box on the ear, followed up by another and another, made their cheeks tingle again, and they were fain to proceed. I can still laugh as I picture to myself those nigger rascals resigning themselves to enter the shrubs, and I see them heaving a sigh, and looking as if they were ready to send their lances through the first devil they should happen to meet. I followed them on through the hazardous pathway, the darkness growing ever deeper. Stumbling on, we made our way over blocks of stone, descending for more than a hundred feet till we reached the entrance of the cave, which, after a low kind of porchway through the rifled rocks, arches itself into a spacious grotto, capable of sheltering some thousand men. [Sidenote: INVOKING THE SPIRITS.] In place of any heart-rending shrieks of wicked ghosts, there was nothing more to alarm us than the whizzing of countless bats (_Phyllorhina caffra_), and thus at once the whole veil of romance was torn asunder. We reclined for a time in the cool shade, and then I invited the whole party to take part in a scene of conjuration, for which they were quite prepared. With the full strength of my voice I cried, “Samiel, Samiel, Afreed!” invoking the spirits of evil to put in an appearance; thus all pretext of fear from that quarter was put to rest; and now belief in ghosts took another shape, and the men pretended that they were terrified, because the cave was a lurking-place of lions; but as a fine brown dust covered the floor of the grotto, leaving it as smooth as though it had just been raked over, I asked them to show me some traces of the lions. They could detect nothing, however, but the vestiges of some porcupines, of which a few quills made it clear that other creatures besides ghosts and bats made the cave their home. That brown dust was a vast mass of guano that had gradually accumulated; I brought away a sack of it with me, and it worked wonders in making my garden productive, resulting in some cabbages of giant growth.