Author's note

________________________________________________
_ On several previous occasions it has happened to this writer of
romance to be justified of his romances by facts of startling
similarity, subsequently brought to light and to his knowledge. In
this tale occurs an instance of the sort, a "double-barrelled"
instance indeed, that to him seems sufficiently curious to be worthy
of telling. The People of the Mist of his adventure story worship a
sacred crocodile to which they make sacrifice, but in the original
draft of the book this crocodile was a snake--/monstrum horrendum,
informe, ingens/. A friend of the writer, an African explorer of great
experience who read that draft, suggested that the snake was
altogether too unprecedented and impossible. Accordingly, also at his
suggestion, a crocodile was substituted. Scarcely was this change
effected, however, when Mr. R. T. Coryndon, the slayer of almost the
last white rhinoceros, published in the /African Review/ of February
17, 1894, an account of a huge and terrific serpent said to exist in
the Dichwi district of Mashonaland, that in many particulars resembled
the snake of the story, whose prototype, by the way, really lives and
is adored as a divinity by certain natives in the remote province of
Chiapas in Mexico. Still, the tale being in type, the alteration was
suffered to stand. But now, if the /Zoutpansberg Review/ may be
believed, the author can take credit for his crocodile also, since
that paper states that in the course of the recent campaign against
Malaboch, a chief living in the north of the Transvaal, his fetish or
god was captured, and that god, a crocodile fashioned in wood, to
which offerings were made. Further, this journal says that among these
people (as with the ancient Egyptians), the worship of the crocodile
is a recognised cult. Also it congratulates the present writer on his
intimate acquaintance with the more secret manifestations of African
folklore and beast worship. He must disclaim the compliment in this
instance as, when engaged in inventing the 'People of the Mist,' he
was totally ignorant that any of the Bantu tribes reverenced either
snake or crocodile divinities. But the coincidence is strange, and
once more shows, if further examples of the fact are needed, how
impotent are the efforts of imagination to vie with hidden truths--
even with the hidden truths of this small and trodden world.

/September/ 20, 1894. _

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