It struck me that they could not know what rifles were, or they would not have treated them with such contempt.
"Put down your guns!" I halloed to the others, seeing that our only chance of safety lay in conciliation.

They obeyed, and walking to the front I addressed the elderly man who had checked the youth.
"Greeting," I said in Zulu, not knowing what language to use.

To my surprise I was understood.
"Greeting," answered the old man, not, indeed, in the same tongue, but in a dialect so closely allied to it that neither Umbopa nor myself had any difficulty in understanding him.

Indeed, as we afterwards found out, the language spoken by this people is an old-fashioned form of the Zulu tongue, bearing about the same relationship to it that the English of Chaucer does to the English of the nineteenth century.
"Whence come you ?" he went on, "who are you?
and why are the faces of three of you white, and the face of the fourth as the face of our mother's sons ?" and he pointed to Umbopa.

I looked at Umbopa as he said it, and it flashed across me that he was right.