"Hlangani, the valiant--the fighting chief of the Ama Gcaleka--the herald of Sarili--is dead. _Hau_!" Then raising his voice to a high taunting pitch, he cried, "where is Maqwela, the warrior who struck the Amanglezi in three wars? His skull is beside thee--talk to it. Where is Mpunhla, erstwhile my friend? He, too, was condemned to `The Home of the Serpents' by thee. He, too, is beside thee. Where is Vudana, my kinsman? The black ants have picked his bones. This, too, was thy work, and I, Josane, would be even as they, but that I have been reserved to deal out vengeance to their slayer! And now when Sarili-- when the _amapakati_ of the house of Gcaleka call for their wise witch-doctress, they will call long and loud but will get no answer, for `The Home of the Serpents' yields not up its secrets. Fare thee well, Ngcenika; rest peacefully. My vengeance is complete. _Hlala-gahle_!" The weird flickering light of the dying candles danced on the figure of the savage standing there on the brink of that horrible hell-pit, gibing at his once terrible but now vanquished foe. Verily there was an appropriateness, a real poetic justice in the fate which had overwhelmed this female fiend. Many a man had she doomed to this awful, this unspeakably horrible fate, through the dictates of revenge, of intrigue, or of sheer devilish, gratuitous savagery. They had languished and died--some in raving mania--here in black darkness and amid horrors unspeakable. Now the same fate had overtaken herself. Josane paused. The groans of his victim were becoming fainter and fainter. "_Hau_! It is music to my ears," he muttered. Then, turning, he deliberately blew out all the lights save the one that he carried, and once more humming his fierce improvised song of vengeance, he sped away through the gloom to rejoin his white companions, leaving this horrible pit of Tophet to the grisly occupancy of its hissing, crawling serpents and its new but fast dying human denizen. CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN. INTO SPACE. "Heavens! What a glorious thing is the light of day!" exclaimed Hoste, looking around as if he never expected to behold that blessing again, instead of having just been restored to it. "Let's hope that philosophical reflection will console us throughout our impending ducking," rejoined Eustace drily. "We are going to get it in half an hour at the outside." Great storm clouds were rolling up beyond the Bashi Valley. The same brooding stillness, now greatly intensified, hung in the air; broken every now and again by fitful red flashes and the dull, heavy boom of thunder. The far off murmur of the river rose up between its imprisoning _krantzes_ and steep forest-clad slopes to the place where their halt was made.