A ghastly fear was upon him. The horror and mystery of the thing got upon even his iron nerves--the suddenness of it too, just when he had lulled himself into a complete sense of security. Had he learned in like fashion that he was to be slain in an ordinary way at a given time it would not have shaken him beyond the ordinary. But this thing--there was something so devilish about it. What did it mean? Was it some grotesque idol worked by mechanism, even as in the old pagan temples--to which human sacrifices were offered? Or--for he could not candidly discredit all the weird and marvellous tales and traditions of some of these up-country tribes, degraded and man-eating as they were--was it some unknown and terrifying monster inhabiting the dens and caves of the earth? Whatever it was, he knew too well, of course, that the coincidence which had so miraculously resulted in the sparing of his life at the hands of the victorious Ba-gcatya, reeking with slaughter, would stand him in nowhere here. He remembered the mystery hanging over the fate of Lutali, and those horrible beings who had hauled the Arab to his doom, whatever it was, who indeed might well constitute the priesthood of the unknown devil-god. Surely never indeed had earth presented a fairer scene than this upon which the adventurer's eyes rested, as he made his way down the mountain-side. The calm, peaceful beauty of the day, the golden sunlight flooding the plain beneath, the great circle of Imvungayo, and the--by contrast--tiny circles of lesser kraals scattered about the valley or crowning some mountain spur, and, mellow upon the stillness, the distant low of cattle--the singing of women at work mingling with the soft voices of a multitude of doves in cornlands and the surrounding forest-trees. Yet now in the white peaks towering to the cloudless heavens, in the black and craggy rifts, in the wide, rolling, partially-wooded plains--the hunter's paradise--this man saw only a gloomy wizard circle, inclosing some horrible inferno, the throne of the frightful demon-god of this extraordinary race.