The countenance of both, darkened by sun and exposure, wore the same expression of blended repose and latent alertness which a roving up-country life seems invariably to produce. Sybrandt--he had dropped the original "Van"--was Dutch by birth, though English by sympathies and associations. Trader, hunter, gold-prospector, adventurer all round, his life had been spent mainly on the confines of civilisation, or far beyond the same; and what he did not know about natives, from the Zambesi to Durban, from Inhambane to Walfisch Bay, nobody else did. He, for his part, was no less known to them. "U' Klistiaan," as they called him, in adaptation of his baptismal name, stood to them as a white man who commanded their respect and confidence far and wide. Of cool courage and unflinching resolution, a firm friend, and, while enmity lasted, a determined and dangerous foe, he stood as high in the estimation of the Zulu-speaking races as these qualifications could place him, which is to say at the highest. He was a man of about forty; in outward aspect of medium height and of sturdy and powerful build, his dark hair and pointed beard just turning iron grey. His companion, whom we heard him address by the name of Blachland, was something of a mystery. Nobody knew much, if anything, about him, except that originally he was an English importation with some years of up-country experience, and that he came and went sporadically, disappearing for a time, and turning up again as if he had been away about a week, perfectly unexplanatory, uncommunicative, as to his doings in the interim. He was a tall dark man, who might be any age compatible with a hardy frame and untiring energy. A keen sportsman and keener adventurer, he was ever on the look out for the possibilities underlying up-country life; and, in curious contrast to his normally hard and philosophic nature, was a tendency to fits of almost boyish excitement and recklessness; which would break out when least expected, and with apparently inadequate motive, and which were wont to land their owner in positions of peril or difficulty, but which, by a curious compensating element in nature, were none the less available to extricate him therefrom right at the critical moment. Now he made no reply to his companion's very confident and more than ominous forecast. But more than one wistful glance did he send in the direction of the great natural mausoleum. The King's grave! This rock sepulchre would hold all that was weird and uncommon, and into it no European eye had ever gazed. That was sufficient for one of Hilary Blachland's temperament.