Now, Mameena, although she was superstitious--a common weakness of great minds--acknowledging no gods in particular, as we understand them, set her own snares, with varying success but a very definite object, namely, that of becoming the first woman in the world as she knew it--the stormy, bloodstained world of the Zulus.
But the reader shall judge for himself, if ever such a person should chance to cast his eye upon this history.
It was in the year 1854 that I first met Mameena, and my acquaintance with her continued off and on until 1856, when it came to an end in a fashion that shall be told after the fearful battle of the Tugela in which Umbelazi, Panda's son and Cetewayo's brother--who, to his sorrow, had also met Mameena--lost his life.

I was still a youngish man in those days, although I had already buried my second wife, as I have told elsewhere, after our brief but happy time of marriage.
Leaving my boy in charge of some kind people in Durban, I started into "the Zulu"-- a land with which I had already become well acquainted as a youth, there to carry on my wild life of trading and hunting.
For the trading I never cared much, as may be guessed from the little that ever I made out of it, the art of traffic being in truth repugnant to me.

But hunting was always the breath of my nostrils--not that I am fond of killing creatures, for any humane man soon wearies of slaughter.
No, it is the excitement of sport, which, before breechloaders came in, was acute enough, I can assure you; the lonely existence in wild places, often with only the sun and the stars for companions; the continual adventures; the strange tribes with whom I came in contact; in short, the change, the danger, the hope always of finding something great and new, that attracted and still attracts me, even now when I _have_ found the great and the new.

There, I must not go on writing like this, or I shall throw down my pen and book a passage for Africa, and incidentally to the next world, no doubt--that world of the great and new! It was, I think, in the month of May in the year 1854 that I went hunting in rough country between the White and Black Umvolosi Rivers, by permission of Panda--whom the Boers had made king of Zululand after the defeat and death of Dingaan his brother.

The district was very feverish, and for this reason I had entered it in the winter months.