It was, perhaps, some such incident as this which gave to Mr. Haggard the idea as to how the Kukuana people from time immemorial preserved their royal dead. He first of all described Twala, the last of the Kukuana kings, as in a limestone cave, with his head perched upon his knees and his vertebræ projecting a full inch above the shrunken flesh of the neck. "Then," he says, "the whole surface of the body was covered by a thin glassy film caused by the dripping of lime-water. The body was being transformed into a stalactite." The antecedent kings were ranged around a table in this wonderful cave, and the author continues:--"A look at the white forms seated on the stone bench that ran around that ghastly board confirmed this view. They were human forms indeed, or rather had been human forms; now they were stalactites [stalagmites?]. This was the way in which the Kukuana people had from time immemorial preserved their royal dead. They petrified them. What the exact system was, if there was any, beyond placing them for a long period of years under the drip, I never discovered; but there they sat, iced over and preserved for ever by the silicious fluid. Anything more awe-inspiring than the spectacle of this long line of departed royalties, wrapped in a shroud of ice-like spar, through which the features could be dimly made out (there were 27 of them, the last being Ignosi's father), and seated round that inhospitable board, with Death himself for a host, it is impossible to imagine. That the practice of thus preserving their kings must have been an ancient one is evident from the number, which, allowing for an average reign of 15 years, would, supposing that every king who reigned was placed here--an improbable thing, as some are sure to have perished in battle far from home--fix the date of its commencement at four and a quarter centuries back. But the colossal Death who sits at the head of the board is far older than that, and, unless I am much mistaken, owes his origin to the same artist who designed the three colossi. He was hewn out of a single stalactite [stalagmite?], and, looked at as a work of art, was most admirably conceived and executed." There is nothing suggestive of anything so hideous as this in the Jenolan Caves. "Lot's wife," as she appears there, is as straight down as a "Shaker," without the slightest suspicion of artificial "improvement." Nor does the pillar correspond with the result of more recent discovery made by an American expedition to the Dead Sea, and in reference to which Dr. Kitto says:--"The course of their survey could hardly fail to bring under notice every marked object upon either shore, and one they did find, an obviously natural formation, which--or others in former times like it--might readily be taken by persons unaccustomed to weigh circumstances with the precision we are now accustomed to exact, for the pillar of Lot's wife. Among the salt mountains of Usdum (an apparent transposition of Sodom), on the