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"Yes," said the girl, "but I do not know where he is nor what are their intentions

in regard to him. In fact, I do not know what their intentions toward me are."

"No one might even guess," said the old woman. "They do not know themselves

from one minute to the next what their intentions are, but I think you can rest

assured, my poor child, that you will never see your friend again."

"But they haven't slain you," the girl reminded her, "and you have been their

prisoner, you say, for sixty years."

"No," replied her companion, "they have not killed me, nor will they kill you,

though God knows before you have lived long in this horrible place you will beg

them to kill you."

"Who are they--" asked Bertha Kircher, "what kind of people? They differ from any

that I ever have seen. And tell me, too, how you came here."

"It was long ago," said the old woman, rocking back and forth on the couch. "It

was long ago. Oh, how long it was! I was only twenty then. Think of it, child!

Look at me. I have no mirror other than my bath, I cannot see what I look like for

my eyes are old, but with my fingers I can feel my old and wrinkled face, my

sunken eyes, and these flabby lips drawn in over toothless gums. I am old and

bent and hideous, but then I was young and they said that I was beautiful. No, I

will not be a hypocrite; I was beautiful. My glass told me that.

"My father was a missionary in the interior and one day there came a band of

Arabian slave raiders. They took the men and women of the little native village

where my father labored, and they took me, too. They did not know much about

our part of the country so they were compelled to rely upon the men of our village

whom they had captured to guide them. They told me that they never before had

been so far south and that they had heard there was a country rich in ivory and

slaves west of us. They wanted to go there and from there they would take us

north, where I was to be sold into the harem of some black sultan.

They often discussed the price I would bring, and that that price might not

lessen, they guarded me jealously from one another so the journeys were made as

little fatiguing for me as possible. I was given the best food at their command and

I was not harmed.

"But after a short time, when we had reached the confines of the country with

which the men of our village were familiar and had entered upon a desolate and

arid desert waste, the Arabs realized at last that we were lost. But they still kept

on, ever toward the west, crossing hideous gorges and marching across the face

of a burning land beneath the pitiless sun. The poor slaves they had captured

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Tarzan the Untamed