"I wish I had eyes!" cried Kingozi petulantly. "What kind of people are they?"
The Leopard Woman told him as best she could--tall, well-formed, copper in hue, of a pleasing expression, clad scantily in goat skins.
"Their ornaments, their arms?" cried Kingozi with impatience.
"They are poor people," replied Bibi-ya-chui. "They have armlets of iron beaten out, and necklaces of shell fragments or bone. They carry spears with a short blade, broad like a leaf."
"Their armlets are not of wire? They have no cowrie shells?"
"Good!" cried Kingozi. "There has been little or no trading here!"
One of the goatherds went with them as guide to M'tela.
"Without doubt," Kingozi surmised, "others have run on to warn M'tela of our coming."
Their way led on a gentle, steady up grade without steep climbs. The hills, at first only scattered, low hummocks, became higher, more numerous, closed in on them; until, before they knew it, they found themselves walking up the flat bed of a cañon between veritable mountains. The end of the view, the Leopard Woman said, was shut by a frowning, unbroken rampart many thousands of feet high.
"Then we are due for a climb," sighed Kingozi. "These native tracks never hunt for a grade! When they want to go up, why up they go!"
But the head of the cañon, instead of stopping against the wall, bent sharply to the left. A "saddle" was disclosed.
Toward this the hard-beaten track led. Shortly it began to mount steeply, and shortly after it entered a high forest growing on the abrupt slopes. Here it was cool and mysterious, with green shadows, and the swing of rope vines, and the sudden remoteness of glimpsed skies. The earth was soft and moist under foot; so the dampness of it rose to the nostrils. Vines and head-high bracken and feather growths covered the ground. In every shallow ravine were groves of tree ferns forty feet tall. A silence dwelt there, a different silence from that of the veldt at night; compounded of a few simple elements, such as the faint, incessant drip of hidden waters and occasional loud, hollowly echoing noises such as the bark of a colobus or the scream of a hyrax. There were birds, rare, flashing, brilliant, furtive birds, but they said nothing.