Thence, it appears, he made his way to another lake that lay up in the mountains, "a lake without a bottom" he called it, and here his wife and brother died of an infectious sickness -- probably smallpox -- whereon the people drove him out of their villages into the wilderness, where he wandered miserably over mountains for ten days, after which he got into dense thorn forest, and was one day found there by some _white men_ who were hunting, and who took him to a place where all the people were white and lived in stone houses.

Here he remained a week shut up in a house, till one night a man with a white beard, whom he understood to be a "medicine-man", came and inspected him, after which he was led off and taken through the thorn forest to the confines of the wilderness, and given food and this sword (at least so he said), and turned loose.' 'Well,' said Sir Henry, who had been listening with breathless interest, 'and what did he do then ?' 'Oh! he seems, according to his account, to have gone through sufferings and hardships innumerable, and to have lived for weeks on roots and berries, and such things as he could catch and kill.
But somehow he did live, and at last by slow degrees made his way south and reached this place.

What the details of his journey were I never learnt, for I told him to return on the morrow, bidding one of my headmen look after him for the night.

The headman took him away, but the poor man had the itch so badly that the headman's wife would not have him in the hut for fear of catching it, so he was given a blanket and told to sleep outside.
As it happened, we had a lion hanging about here just then, and most unhappily he winded this unfortunate wanderer, and, springing on him, bit his head almost off without the people in the hut knowing anything about it, and there was an end of him and his story about the white people; and whether or no there is any truth in it is more than I can tell you.

What do you think, Mr Quatermain ?' I shook my head, and answered, 'I don't know.