Chapter XII: Part 12

The two children in the early morning--it is just after sunrise--are laughing and crowing with the excitement of the forming _safari_ and the coming start. The three-year-old boy, Ambrose, is named after his grandfather; the baby girl has been called Sibyl at her mother's request. In all probability Lucy had never even so much as suspected that there was more than cousinly affection between her husband and Lady Silchester: it would have taken something like ocular evidence to make her doubt Roger's fidelity. At first Sibyl had frightened and humbled her, but during the last year of their association, at Engledene, she had been coolly kind and had shown something like gratitude for Lucy's care of her ugly fretful little boy. Before Lucy had left to rejoin her husband in East Africa, Sibyl had said: "I expect you'll have a lot more children. If you have another girl, call it by my name. I should like to be associated with a child of Roger's. Promise? Very well then: in return I'll give an eye to little John and fat Maud whilst you are in Africa. Indeed I cannot see why they shouldn't move over here from Aldermaston, when your own people get tired of them; and share Clithy's nursery.... At any rate come here on visits, and if they quarrel it will do Clithy a world of good. His nurses give him too much sense of his own importance."

So there was at least this pleasant thing for them to look forward to, even though Lucy's eyes were wet with tears at leaving Iraku. Engledene Lodge as well as Church Farm would be open to them. Sibyl, more ambitious than ever of cutting a dash, playing a part in modern history, rivalling Lady Feenix, revenging herself for snubs by the Brinsley clan, lived much in London and gave up Engledene to the quiet bringing-up of her only child. When she went down there it was to rest and repair her beauty, to transact humdrum estate business with Maurice Brentham. Except for the autumn shooting parties she entertained very little at Engledene. It was in Scotland and above all in London that she played the lavish hostess and sought to undermine Cabinets and bring a new recruit to the Opposition.

She was now thirty-four, and when animated only looked twenty-six. Rumour had assigned her several love affairs, which out of England--on the Riviera, at Paris, at Rome--were said to have been carried to the borders of indiscretion. It had even been announced that "a marriage had been arranged and would shortly take place," etc., between Lady Silchester and Sir Elijah Tooley--but the announcement had been promptly contradicted, and a month after occurred the first resounding crack in the Tooley edifice....

It was curious how her personality projected itself across five thousand miles of land and sea into Equatorial Africa; so that Lucy and perhaps Roger should both have been thinking about her as they were preparing to leave their home in this secluded region. Lucy thought of Sibyl pleasantly as of one she no longer feared because she never desired to cross her path as a rival, or contest her superiority. Sibyl would offer her a temporary home in her home country where her children could be riotously happy, and where Roger--even--might be tempted to join her for a few months before resuming his strenuous life as a conqueror of the wilderness. Roger had held out this hope to alleviate the sadness of their approaching separation.

He was to accompany his wife and sister as far as Burungi; after which he must return to the Iraku Hills to take full advantage of the dry-season months for great projected developments of the planting and mining industries. From Burungi, now quite an important centre of traffic, whence well-made roads proceed coastwards, with rest-houses every twenty miles, Lucy and Maud and the precious children would be escorted to the coast port of their embarkation by the two German sergeants, whose service Brentham has taken over from the Stotts. Their journey might be broken by a few days' rest at Hangodi in the Nguru country. Maud would like to see the scene of the tragedy and of Lucy's induction into African life. Lucy would like to pay a visit of sentiment to John Baines's grave and to live over again in a sense of contrite reminiscence her brief experiences as a missionary's wife. She wants to put herself back in time to where the outlook seemed hopeless, and realize the wide horizon of happiness which now seems open before her.

So--an hour late, with all these last thoughts, musing reflections and leave-takings--Halima is howling with grief because she must remain behind--the caravan starts on its first day's march. Lucy from delicacy of constitution is unable to ride much, so she travels in a machila with her baby. Maud bestrides a Maskat donkey and hopes when she returns they will by that time have got horses safely through the tsetse belt, into interior transport ... "you have so little initiative on a donkey, it will never do anything unconventional." Ambrose being thought too young to ride a donkey is handed over to his special guardian and chum, a tall Manyamwezi porter who hoists him on to his broad shoulders. From this elevation of six feet he surveys the landscape as the _safari_ swings along. Some German friend had given him the previous Christmas a tin trumpet, and with blasts of this and shouts of glee he hails the sight of game standing at gaze in the distance.

This would have annoyed any sportsman of the caravan had they been bent on killing for the pot or the trophy; but his father lets him do this unrebuked. He is not intending to transgress his own by-laws about game preservation, and the caravan in these bountiful days has its food supply ensured from station to station. Still Roger reflects musingly as he rides up hill and down hill through the breadth of the Happy Valley and up to the low ridge and water-partings which mark its limit and the commencement of the long descent through Irangi, that in one respect the glamour of the Happy Valley has already withered under the practical need for developing its resources. Though there has been no deliberate big-game slaughter in hecatombs as on the British side of the frontier, the Grant's gazelles, the hartebeests and tsesebes, the elands, zebra, and impala are never to be seen now grazing near the road. They are retreating every year farther into the unprofitable wastes away from the well-beaten tracks, noisy with the coming and going of carriers, soldiers, native traders, or ivory hunters. These last, under some degree of control, are even being encouraged to pursue the elephants into the recesses of the hills and forests of the north; not only to bring down as much ivory as possible, to sell, but because the elephant has met civilization too abruptly. He has contemptuously knocked down the laboriously erected telegraph posts, and has snapped and tangled-up the copper wire. This in its derelict condition is too sore a temptation to the native accustomed to regard copper wire as a decorative article of the highest value ... so many cubits of copper wire would buy a wife. So an edict has gone forth which Roger himself could not protest against, that between Burungi and Kondoa any one, native or European, may kill as many elephants as he pleases. The native herdsmen, again, whom they pass on the road lazily minding the cattle, sheep and goats, are no longer in the state of Paradisiac nudity that characterized them on that first journey of Roger and Lucy down the Happy Valley. No one has remonstrated with them on their nakedness: a hint from Dame Fashion has been enough. The white men and the white men's black followers have been clothed, so they too must wear old uniforms, old coats, old trousers, something in the way of frowsy coverings of their bronze bodies.

The vulgarization of Africa has begun. Never again will there be seen in this region a condition of unspoilt Nature as it first showed itself to the Brenthams. But as a set-off Roger draws Lucy's attention to the telegraph line in course of re-erection, after the rude elephantine protests. It is proceeding to a great German military post, but a branch will presently be carried to Iraku--almost as soon as she is back in Berkshire--and _then_ he and she will be in close touch. It will be possible, at a cost of a few pounds, to telegraph to one another and receive the answer in a day--two days at most.

It is four years since the Brenthams saw Burungi, for Roger's journeys, meantime, have ranged farther and farther afield towards the mysterious--still mysterious--region between the Happy Valley and the shores of the Victoria Nyanza. Even then, when Roger rode there to meet his wife and Maud on their journey inland--Maud's first introduction to Real Africa--the desolate Burungi of 1888 was no longer recognizable, with its wilderness of thorn bushes and baobabs on which gorged vultures were perching, its lurking lions and hyenas, as the evening darkened, its flitting, furtive, thievish Wagogo, the ruined station of the Stotts, and no other visible sign of habitation. Even four years ago, though the vultures were still there, it was to feed on the offal of a well-supplied market-place, the thorn bushes had been burnt for firewood or cut up for fences, and a corrugated iron hut on the Stotts' site, though villainously hot in sunshine, provided shelter and security for stores. Now there were brick houses and a number of grass huts on the Mission enclosure near the river. There were half-finished Government buildings in course of erection and many tents for the accommodation of a staff of military officials and constantly saluting white civilians. A number of clothed Wagogo, looking singularly mean in their garments--though without them they were lithe and graceful savages--were, under the raucous directions of a white engineer-sergeant, laying down a light Decauville railway.

All these activities had not for the time being made Burungi less ugly, and Roger hated the sight of the place. After a long conference with the two civil-spoken German sergeants, who a year previously had been truly thankful to exchange the military career for employment under his Company, he went through the agony of good-bye--an agony he would not protract by spending the night in this noisy, discomfortable place. He compressed his embraces of wife and children--the latter mystified and yowling with the dim realization of bereavement--his wringing of Maud's hands, his directions to telegraph at every opportunity till they got on board, and hang the cost--into two hours; after which, though only two more hours of daylight remained, he rode away, back to their camp of the previous night: knowing that further lingering might end in his deciding to accompany these two dear women and prattling babes all the way to the coast and perhaps all the way to England.

And it was essential to their future welfare that he should stay where he was and not claim a holiday till certain results had been achieved and certain proofs of easily exploited wealth had been obtained.

But it was a melancholy Roger who, six days afterwards, rode back into the lovely amphitheatre in the Iraku hills where he had made his home. His Maskat donkey showed signs of having being hard ridden; his carriers averred that Master, ordinarily so considerate of their fatigue, so jolly on the line of march, had spurred them on remorselessly, had seemed to pass wakeful nights and had eaten his camp meals with poor appetite. Roger himself felt a few more partings like this would make his earthly life unbearable. Oh that there _were_ some truth in the silly hymn chorus that the Stotts delighted in making their pupils sing: "Here we meet to _part no more_, _part_ no more, _part_ no more!" He should have been firm with Lucy and bade her stay till he himself was ready to go. And yet when _would_ he be ready to go, with Phantom Fortune always beckoning yet never disclosing the final hoard?

There was something in Lucy's face which restrained him from insisting that she should stay. Dr. Wiese had hinted at a growing anaemia which should be checked. Her dominating feeling was a fear that she might lose the precious children born to her here in the wilderness and be forgotten by those she had left behind. He must not take the thing too tragically. If Hildebrandt continued to get these satisfactory assays and could trace the gold-bearing reef a sufficient distance towards the western limit of the Concession; or if on the other hand he could find the matrix of the diamonds, and not merely these minute brilliants in the gravel of the mountain streams, their main doubts and difficulties would be relieved and he could depart for a holiday at home.

The return to his house was some alleviation of his bereavement. It was so associated with the presence of wife and sister and of his babies. The afternoon sun was behind him; it would soon drop below the blue mountain wall which was a rampart of protection to the site he had chosen for his European settlement. How often he and Lucy had stood here in blue shadow and looked towards the sun-flooded east beyond the shade of the escarpment, towards the Happy Valley! This was just such a close to the day as they had loved to witness three hundred days out of the three hundred and sixty-five of the year. To the north stretched the lake of cobalt blue, with its irregular blush-tinted rim of flamingo hosts. South-east of the lake beyond lush swamps and green plantations, were the Umbugwe villages and the Stotts' large station--little points, clusters, and pencils of brown and white. The whitest speck was the Stotts' new Chapel. He had been present at its opening ceremony a month ago--to gratify Mrs. Stott. Beyond lake and villages were the gathering masses of mighty mountains, ending north-eastwards in the snow-tipped pyramid of Meru--on this clear evening--in the supernatural snowy dome of Kibo. What a prospect! And yet he would willingly exchange for it the view over southern Berkshire from the down of Farleigh Wallop.

He entered his house. The presence of Lucy and Maud seemed as if it must be material, no: merely spiritual. He looked into their rooms. They had been considerately tidied before they left, and showed little sign of packing up and departure. Lucy was a good house-wife, he reflected, and she probably judged that in her absence he might want to entertain guests, colleagues come on business, Government officials. So that her room and his sister's were ready prepared for occupation. The nursery was a little more desolate. The toys had been given away to Halima's children. If ever Ambrose and Sibyl came back--and how unlikely that they would!--they would have grown far beyond the love of toys. Maud had left most of her songs on the top of the piano. She could get newer ones in England. The vases were filled with fresh flowers from bush and garden. Halima had put them there, faithful to her mistress's directions.

Halima now called him to his tea, on the verandah. The table was laid with all the care that Lucy was wont to bestow on it. Andrade the cook had baked a nice cake and even attempted something resembling a muffin--a kind of compromise between a muffin and a tea cake, due to a confounding of Maud's instructions. Roger's eyes filled with tears. Halima, departing with a brass tray, answered with two loud sobs in her facile grief. Yet a few years before she had been ready to abandon her mistress in distress when she was stranded in Mr. Callaway's unsavoury depot at Unguja. His eyes followed her portly form magnificently swathed in red Indian cottons, with tolerant good will. There was a good deal of the humbug about all these black people, but it was kindly humbug. He was grateful for this comprehension of his sorrow, for this effort to carry out his wife's instructions that the comforts and little elegancies of their home should be continued after her absence.

Then the tame Crowned cranes came below the verandah to be fed with bread and cake as Maud had encouraged them to do. His black-and-tan English terrier, confined for safety in the cook's quarters during his absence, had been released and now came tearing up the steps and rushing along the verandah till it was in contact with his lowered hand, volleying forth a long succession of eager barks of joy and whimpers of hysterical distress and relief at Master's absence and return....

In the evening after dinner Wiese, Hildebrandt and Riemer (Plantation Manager) came up to pay their respects to the Herr Direktor and give him an informal report of all that had occurred during his absence. They tactfully said little about his bereavement, though Hildebrandt heaved some theatrical sighs at the sight of Maud's music on the piano. But they had much to say in German and English that was interesting and encouraging. So they sat up late into the night talking and discussing. Andrade sent them up an impromptu supper, wine and beer were drunk in the moderation imposed by their then rarity--owing to transport difficulties--and when they finally departed at one in the morning, under the firmament of blazing stars, with lemon-yellow lanterns to light their path back to their respective quarters, the grass-widower betook himself to his couch in a more resigned frame of mind. There would be great doings, great strokes to hew out fortunes for all of them, within the next few months.

A fortnight afterwards, by swift runner from Kondoa, came a telegraphic message despatched from Saadani:

Arrived here safely. Leave for Unguja to-morrow. God bless you.--LUCY MAUD.

Thereafter followed long day-rides of inspection, an occasional week's absence from home studying possibilities in remote parts of the Concession, holding conferences with the Stotts, laying cases and possibilities of special difficulty before the German officer commanding at Kondoa. His talks with the Stotts were directed to several ends: urging the Stotts to get into the confidence of all the native tribes--Bantu, Hamitic, Nilotic--of the Concession's area and find out how far their interests might be subserved by the full exploitation of the animal, vegetable and mineral wealth of this patch of East Africa. "Unless we carry the natives with us," he would say, "this enterprise must eventually fail, wither up; because, boast of the climate as we may, the hard manual labour cannot be performed by white men: we must fall back on the native. Now half the men-natives in these parts are picturesque to look at, graceful figure and all that; but they shirk hard work. They prefer to loll about in the sun or to run after women. Can't you put some ambition into 'em? Teach them something besides these rotten hymns and prayers that are meaningless to them?"

"But we do," said Mrs. Stott. "You haven't looked over our school for two years, I believe. You seem to have got hymn-singing on the brain. Our hymns translated by us are not rubbish and the natives enjoy singing them...."

"I don't doubt they do, though I don't see what use it is. Neither they nor the prayers prevent the Almighty from sending the flights of locusts.... Or rather these appeals and this excessive praise do not stimulate the Divine power to do _something_ to abate Africa's myriad plagues. It is always poor Man--and most of all, poor _White_ man--who has to work his brain and body to exhaustion to set right what Nature perversely sets wrong. Here am I, trying to abate the grasshopper plague in our tobacco plantations by encouraging the domestication of the Crowned crane. Yet the natives won't take any interest in this idea, though the Crowned cranes feed themselves and have charming manners. Can't you push this matter in your schools? Couldn't you preach a sermon on the uses of the Crowned crane?"

On another occasion he put a further difficulty before the Ewart Stotts. "Look here! I'm going to take you again into my confidence. I want you to find me an assistant, some one of your own kin in Australia who would come out here at short notice on an agreement for three years--I even want two men, one of them versed in shorthand and typewriting who could be my secretary. I don't know any one in England who isn't either a rotter or a potential rotter, or hasn't got a job already. There's my brother Geoffrey, but he's a Commander now in the Navy, getting on fine, and simply wouldn't think of chucking the service to come here. My other brother is well suited as a land-agent. I want something Australian, some one as like you two as possible. I don't mind a moderate amount of religion, as long as it doesn't waste their time on week-days, and they can't be too teetotal for my liking. No Whisky-drinker need apply."

"Why, I believe we know of the very two, at any rate of the principal one," said Mrs. Stott: "My nephew Phil Ewart. I haven't seen him since he was a baby, but my brother's wife writes to me now and again and says he's doing very well on a big sheep run in Queensland...."

"Well then, look here: let's draft a cablegram that I can send off from the coast. I'll guarantee him a year's salary and, if he turns out satisfactory, a three years' agreement--L500 a year. He can choose any likely young fellow ... good character ... abstainer ... serve as clerk ... L200 a year commence ... take steamer Australia-Durban, and German steamer Durban-Saadani, and so on, up-country. If I get 'em here by November I can give em three months' trial before I set out for home.... _Must_ take a holiday next year and bring my wife out afterwards. Don't like to leave this business without a Britisher in it to watch my interests, don't you know, and advise me how things are going while I am away."

So they arranged the matter between them. Then Mrs. Stott said: "I've a funny proposition to make. A week ago I received a letter from Ann Jamblin that was ... at Hangodi.... Ann Anderson she is now. She saw Lucy there five weeks ago and was much touched at her calling on them. Says she took a special fancy to your dear, sweet, pretty children. Her own little girl is very ailing. Well, now she goes on to say old Mrs. Doland, who was a great supporter of their Mission, has died and only left the East African Mission L5,000. For this and other reasons the Mission thinks of giving up Hangodi, as it is quite an isolated station now, and all their others are in the British Sphere.... Well, to put it quite plain, as you're impatient to be gone--oh, _I_ know by the way you're tapping your gaiters--how would it be if your Concession or you or some one advanced our Mission L150 for out-of-pocket expenses--so as to move quickly, don't you know? And we sent word to Ann and her husband to join us as soon as they had definite authority to evacuate Hangodi. The German Government, I believe, are going to buy the station. If we got Ann and her husband up here the couple of them would strengthen our hands mightily and then we could give some of that worldly instruction you're so anxious about. Or make it up in some way of help. Strengthen the British element here. For although I don't hold with your views about Providence one little bit, and believe the World was made in six days and am surprised every now and again that you aren't struck down for your audacity, not to say blasphemy, yet something tells me you and we are really working for the same Divine ends...."

Roger said the matter should certainly have his attention. (Before he left for England the following Spring Ann and Eb were members of the Stott Mission, and the Stotts were able to open another station and school in the Iraku country.)

The months flew by through autumn, winter and spring. Roger established a stud farm in the Happy Valley where he could locate a captured dozen of zebra and interbreed with Maska donkeys ... perhaps a manageable, large-bodied zebra-mule might solve some of their transport difficulties in the regions of the tse-tse fly. He introduced shorthorn cattle from South Africa to mingle with the native oxen and improve the milk supply. He imported from Natal six Basuto ponies, two stallions and four mares. He ordered three safety bicycles--the great new invention or combination of inventions. He and his German engineers, reinforced by a clever Swiss sent out by the German directorate, gave special consideration to the waterfalls of Iraku, to harness them to turbines and produce electric light. This power would feed electric dynamos when the progress of the railway construction enabled such heavy things to reach the Happy Valley. They laid out great coffee plantations and experimented in tea and quinine. It was hoped the natives might take up all these cultures in time, on their own account, as they had done that of cacao on the Gold Coast and in the German Cameroons.

The day for his departure in the early spring came ever nearer and nearer. The two Australians arrived, went down with fever, recovered and eventually proved the right stuff, especially young Philip Ewart. Mrs. Stott said she would see he did not get into mischief while the Director was absent in England. She would also give an eye to the Brenthams' house and the doings of Andrade and Halima as caretakers.

There was therefore little cause for anxiety on Roger's part as he made his preparations for a six-months' absence, save the rumoured doings of a certain Stolzenberg, a mysterious German hunter who, coming from the British Sphere, had established himself near the north-west escarpment of Lake Manyara, apparently on the border of the Happy Valley Concession (Gluecklichesthals Konzession).

*CHAPTER XIX*

*TROUBLE WITH STOLZENBERG*

In those days--to parody a line of Holy Writ--it might be said, "To every man, a crater or two"; if you were referring to the wilderness which lay between Kilimanjaro and the southern Rift Valleys, and to the strange adventurers who in the 'nineties ranged up and down the East African interior between Baringo on the north and the Happy Valley on the south, over a region of elevated steppe land, isolated mountains of immense height, and extinct volcanoes. Some of these lawless men were accumulating considerable wealth in ivory, sheep and cattle. They wanted fortresses in which to live and store their plunder, or the spoil of their chase, the elephant tusks, the rhino horns, the lion and leopard skins, the black and white mantles of the long-haired colobus monkeys, the ostrich plumes; even the roughly-cured skins of the rosy flamingoes which were becoming an article of great demand in the plumage trade. For this purpose the large and small craters of presumably extinct volcanoes were ready to hand; as though Nature had anticipated their wants. Most of these were surrounded on the inside by the nearly continuous, circular wall of the crater, only broken down at one point where the lava or nowadays a stream of water (the overflow of a little crater lake) issued from the crater floor. Here with piled stones it was easy to restrict the gap and hold the entrance against any savage enemy without artillery. These defences were, of course, prepared against the Masai and not with any idea of defying a White Government, whose advent at that time seemed very problematical: at any rate a White Government that would interfere to protect the natives, to obstruct elephant killing, or regulate the movements of cattle between a disease-infected area and one that still possessed uninfected flocks and herds.

It was to one of these craters--very red in colour--that Roger Brentham rode up at the end of March, 1897, after three days' difficult journey from the south. He halted his little _safari_ of armed porters and his four Somali gun-men on a level tableland in front of the gap in the crater walls; a gap cleverly closed by a huge door of yew planks and a bridge of yew trunks thrown over the issuing brook, with stones piled on top to a height of twenty feet. There were obvious indications that the walls and woodwork were loopholed for gun-fire. He called several times loudly in Swahili and German to arouse an answer and rapped on the cumbrous door.

Presently a smaller door within the great one opened and there emerged a sullen-looking negro giant, probably a Makua from the south. [Such offer themselves for service in Unguja.] "Unatakaje?" he asked in Swahili. "I want to see your Bwana--I do not know his 'native' name," said Brentham, "but just take this 'karata' to him and he will read my name; and say I wish to see him. Meantime I will make a camp here."

The Makua doorkeeper or watchman returned within, and possibly an hour passed before anything further happened, during which Brentham had his tent erected, and arranged for his men--they were travelling very light--to make their sleeping-places around it.

The small door was again reopened and there stepped out a remarkable-looking man of over six feet, with enormous recurved moustaches, a sombrero hat, jackboots and a general swashbuckling air and a visible revolver in the broad belt that held up his breeches. He walked slowly towards Roger who advanced to meet him.

"Did you come to see me?" he asked in English.

"I did," said Roger; "that is, if your name is Stolzenberg?"

"It is ... for to-day--at any rate. Well: here I am. You come to tell me 'it is Easter Sunday, and Christ Is Risen,' like the Russians do?"

"Why, is it Easter Sunday? Dear me! I had no idea. If so, I might have chosen another time. Still, as I _am_ here and as you _are_ here--and I fancy you are often absent?--I should be obliged if we could have a talk, come to an understanding, don't you know?" (There was no answering friendliness in the fierce face that looked into his, the face of a perfectly ruthless man, eyes with bloodshot whites, wide mouth with pale flaccid lips, showing strong tobacco-stained teeth, prominent cheek bones, lowering brows, a massive jaw, and here and there an old duelling scar.)

"An unnerstanding?" he said sneeringly. "What about? _I_ unnerstand you. I know who you are, now I see your card. You are Captain Brentham. Once you were Consul ... at ... Unguja. Then you run away with missionary's wife--and--you are ... no more Consul. You do somesing shocking, _nicht wahr_? It is so easy to shock your Gover'ment--and now von Wissmann--that Morphinsaeufer--he gif you a Concession. An' I suppose you come now to say I trespass on your Concession? Very well then, I _do_, an' I don' care a damn for you or for any Gover'ment you like to name. I make this my home six, seven years ago and no one come to turn me out now, unless they fight me first.

"I haven't come to turn you out," said Roger. Stolzenberg laughs noisily and contemptuously.... "It's not my business to do so. I have come with a very small following to make your acquaintance, to find out for myself what you were like and to see whether it was possible to deal with you..." (As he is talking he sees that through the open doorway of the stronghold there are issuing a large number of armed black men, dressed like the coast people--perhaps a hundred), "to deal with you as one white man might deal with another. But before I can even put our case--our Concession's case--before you, you commence by insulting me and making a lying statement about my wife--and you probably now intend threatening me by an attack with your Askari[#]--who I see are gathering up behind you."

[#] Soldiers.

"These men," said Stolzenberg, glancing round at them and shouting an order to them to be seated, "are only there to make sure. You Britishers are always up to some trick. I thought just to show you I stand no nonsense. As to what I say ... a-bout Meeses ... Brentham, I ... only ... say ... what your ... own country-men say on coast. But let that pass. What is this unnerstanding you propose to me--a Partnership? Well, I am open to a bargain. What is it to be? What terms do you offer?"

"I haven't come here to discuss any such thing. I came to say this. As you ask the question, this extraordinary place--I suppose it is the crater of a volcano?--does not lie within our limits. You are not trespassing on our property. But for the past nine months or so we have had many complaints about you or about your men. You raid the natives, you take the Masai cattle and apparently drive them into this stronghold. You even kidnap the Iraku women...."

"I do _not_ kidnap.... They come here of their own pleasure ... they are free to go if they like. But they like my men much better than their own husbands who cannot gif them closs or beads...."

"And finally," continued Roger, almost choking with the effort to speak in a level voice and not send a fist smashing into the large face that bends over his so threateningly, "finally, you drove away by force two of our prospecting parties at the north end of the Lake and..."

"Those men," shouted Stolzenberg ... "they ... they come just to spy out my defences ... but look here. You and I are big fools--p'raps I am bigger fool than you.... I lose my temper first, I say things a-bout a la-dy which perhaps are not true.... I apologize.... Nutting they say on the coast is true! Look at the lies they tell about me!" (a boisterous laugh). "They say at Mombasa I am biggest blaggard unhung. That is--what you say? ex-agger-a-ted? And look at the lies Bri-tish missionaries tell about my friend, Doctor Peters. It is that make me so angry just now. German Gover'ment belief these lies and send my good friend away. And then there is a fine Englishman I know, a nobleman in your country, a Sir--Sir Wil-low-by Pat-terne. You would hardly belief the things they say a-bout him--always be-hind his back...."

"So you know Willowby Patterne," said Roger (greatly interested).

"I haf seen him once or twice," replied Stolzenberg, becoming suspicious. "But you do not come here, I sup-pose, to talk about him? You come to make my acquaintance. Well: you haf made it. Now you leaf me alone and I will leaf you alone. I ... what you say? I 'will not return your call'? My quarrel with the Masai is not _your_ business. I haf--what do we say? I haf 'vendetta' against the Masai. When I first come out to East Africa on my own business I fit out a _safari_ and travel to Kenya to buy ivory. I do no harm to Masai, but they attack my camp, they kill a young German man with me, my _very great_ friend; they kill most of my men--and see! They try to kill me" (pulls up shirt and shows long scar over ribs on left side), "and they kill my dogs. Only when they see Kikuyu coming down in large war party do they leaf off stabbing and go away with most of my trade goods. The Kikuyu carry me up to their village and save my life--I haf always been good friend to Kikuyu since.--You ask them! Well now, I get my own back. Whenever I see Masai now, I shoot. I put fear of death into them...."

"This is an interesting bit of biography," said Brentham, "but I thought those lawless days were gone by. I haven't heard the Masai version of your story. Perhaps they had some excuse. At any rate, they were not the same clan as the Masai round here, friends of mine for years; and you've no right to make war on them. Outside our concession, that's not _my_ affair. Your Government----"

"Do not say _my_ Gover'ment," roared Stolzenberg. "It is not mine. I do not ask for it! I am my own gover'ment. I was in these countries before ever came any German or any British Gover'ment."

"Well then, the Government of this region, the Government that has got the most right to govern ... I say--No! you _must_ hear me out before I go--what you may do outside our concession is between you and them. But if after this warning you interfere with our people, the people inside this Concession I am managing, and in which I'm a magistrate, you'll run up against _me_, and I shall shoot you at sight like you do the Masai...."

"All right! Haf a drink before you go?"

"No, I won't," said Roger. And wheeling round on his listening men, he shouted: "Pigeni kambi. Maneno yamekwisha. Twende zetu." Then, so that his leave-taking might lose none of its abruptness, he strode to where his Maskat donkey was tethered, released it, jumped into the saddle, and rode slowly away till he was out of sight, below the space of level ground. There he waited till his men had rejoined him with their light loads. The first to arrive were the four Somali gun-men. They had long since learnt to speak Swahili and they said, laughing, in relief that the palaver had ended without recourse to firearms: "Ulimshinda na maneno, Bwana mkubwa, ulimshinda, yule Mdachi. Walakini, ukiondoka, akasema watu wake. 'Simchuki, yule Mwingrezi. Mwanaume.'"[#]

[#] "You conquered him with words, Great Master, you defeated him, that German. But when you left he said to his people: 'I don't hate him, that Englishman. He is a man.'"

Roger rode away musing from this encounter, or rather rode and walked over an exceedingly rough country with scarcely a native path or sign of habitation, a country depopulated doubtless by former wars and raids of tribe on tribe: for it was well watered.

The tall clumps of Euphorbias gave the red landscape a sinister look, for their articulated branches looked like a conjunction of gigantic scorpions, bodies meeting together and stinging tails erected in the air; the fleshy-leaved aloes of deep bottle-green sent up blood-red stalks of blood-red tubular flowers; on the higher ground there were many rust-red or red-lead-coloured "red-hot pokers"--what the initiated call Kniphofias. The country somehow suggested blood and iron; for the old and faded Euphorbias might have been cut out of rusty metal, and iron ore was so obviously permeating the rocks.

He mused on the violence to which Africa always seemed a prey. The reign of law in East Africa in both the British and German spheres seemed to be preceded by the reign of the outlaws. He knew enough as a traveller and an ex-official, and as a resident in the lands bordering on the British sphere, to be aware that just then the British hinterland was a prey to German and British, Austrian, American, South African and even Goanese-Indian buccaneers, who obeyed no laws or injunctions of the feeble Chartered Company or of the weak young Protectorate Government which followed.

Some of these outlaws had come to East Africa with a voluble Austrian crank and two Russian anarchists who tried to found an impossible Utopia in South Galaland, the Colony of Freiheit--the main principle of which was that the oppressed white people of Central and Eastern Europe were to be free to do as they liked here and take all they wanted, while the natives of East Africa were to be their serfs. The natives of that part of East Africa--the proud Galas--who did not even know a _good_ white man when they saw him, or allow him to live--soon settled the hash of the Freiheiters, many of whom (there were three hundred in all) died of malarial fever. The remnant that escaped across the Tana became a scourge of inner East Africa; and a faint flavour of their unscrupulousness still remains. At the time of Roger's musing ride back from Stolzenberg's red Crater-fortress to his home at Magara on the Iraku escarpment there were about a dozen of these pioneers of civilization still remaining in activity. A few had made moderate competencies and had returned to Central Europe to abandon Communism in favour of State and Church, and to make respectable marriages with high-born damsels. The greater devils, the altogether branded-with-the-brand-of-Cain that remained would one by one either enter some company's service, not too scrupulous as to antecedents, or die bloody and terrible deaths. Meantime, they shot enormous numbers of elephants, made themselves chiefs of nomad tribes, started harems of twenty or thirty bought or snatched damsels (who thought the whole episode rather a lark), accumulated great herds of cattle, sheep, goats and Masai donkeys. Later, as things became more defined, frontiers more precise, laws more clearly formulated and regulations--my own for example--more vexatious, they turned themselves into smugglers and professional lawbreakers. They conveyed out of British into German territory forbidden ivory of female elephants; they brought from the German sphere cattle that might be affected with some germ disease and were therefore forbidden to enter British territory; they disposed of rhinoceros horns that were in excess of the miserly allowance granted to big-game slaughterers; they carried on a brisk slave trade by enrolling hundreds of labourers in German East Africa and conveying them hundred of miles into British East Africa and disposing of them at a premium to the many associations and enterprises requiring the black man's strong arm and patient labour; and they redressed the balance by raiding unnoticed districts under the British flag and transporting the inhabitants to German East Africa to be enrolled as labourers under military discipline.

A few of them were unmitigated scoundrels, two or three had a maniac's blood-lust for killing beautiful creatures of little use when killed; or delighted in inflicting cruelties on the natives "to show their power." Many a blameless Government or Company's official proceeding up-country has been surprised at the hatred which flamed out at his approach, he guiltless of any unkindness or injustice. One or other of these masterless men were the cause of the treacherous attack on his caravan, or the loss of his life in an ambush which had to be expensively avenged by a military expedition.

Yet if there was the left wing of his Legion of the Damned which drew up at the foot of the gallows, there was the right wing, headed by Sir Willowby Patterne, which remained in touch with good society and even dined, coming and going, at the Administrator's table or with Sir Bennet Molyneux at home. Nothing to their actual discredit was proved against them. And East Africa was five thousand miles from Mayfair.

Patterne, whose first shooting expedition of 1890-91 had resulted in quite a nice little profit from the ivory it obtained, took up definitely an East African career. He had at first tried to get himself commissioned for the interior of the Chartered Company's territory. But its directors were well-intentioned, shrewd men and his home reputation barred the way. Yet he could not very well--being a Baronet of far-reaching connexions--be denied access to this loosely governed region, whither he came every two or three years. After his first journey and the court cases it aroused at Unguja, he was not such a fool as to continue his savage treatment of his carriers and servants or he would soon have been unable to recruit a caravan. On the contrary he paid well and gave a liberal food allowance, and within limits his enforcement of a rather Prussian discipline exacted the respect of the Negro, who appreciates arbitrary power if it is not accompanied by meanness in money matters. His reckless slaughter of game made him even popular with his expeditions because it gave the men a surfeit of meat, and trophies to turn into amulets.

Patterne at last became tolerated as an inevitable concomitant of the march of civilization, and acquired citizenship in British East Africa by staking out a vague "concession" near the north-west corner of the Kilimanjaro slopes on the edge of the German frontier. It was in this way and in this neighbourhood that he got to know Adolf Stolzenberg, whom he helped in his raids against the Masai; less by direct participation than by furnishing him with arms and ammunition and by disposing of his captured cattle.

"What do you know about this curious personage, Stolzenberg?" asked Roger of his two friends, Hildebrandt and Wiese, when he had returned to Magara from his visit to the Red Crater.

"Only what we hear people say," replied Hildebrandt. "Some say he is just a Sous African German who do some bad sing in Sous Africa and com up here ten, twelf year ago to join the Denhardts. Ozzers say he com from Germany long before, wiz Dr. Fischer, and zat he was natural son of our old Emperor Wilhelm One. First, Emperor put him in army, and several times pay his debts, and zen when he kill anozzer officer in duel he pack him off to Africa and say, 'Never let me see your face again.' But p'raps zat is only story invented by ze man himself. Somtimes I sink our Government use him in som way. I dare say your Government do ze same by zis ozzer man you hate so, Vill-o-bee Patterne. What a fonny name! Your English names are somtimes more fonny zan ours!"

The German Commandant, consulted by Roger (who in April, 1897, was on his way to the coast after having made everything safe behind him), was rather noncommittal about Stolzenberg. The conversation was in German, punctuated with phrases of Swahili on the part of the Commandant, who was proud of having acquired a smattering of this African tongue. He was rather non-committal about the denizen of the Red Crater. He was a "derben Kerl" ... "Simba yule, kabisa," the terror of the Masai. He kept the Masai occupied in that quarter while the Germans tackled the Wa-hehe on the south. He must be given some latitude ... the Commandant would see he did not impinge on the Concession ... perhaps he might be persuaded to take command of a large irregular force against the Wa-hehe....

"'_Divide et impera_,' sehen Sie? Em glas Rheinwein, nicht so? Und Soda? Ein lang-trinken in der Englische phrase...."

It seemed incongruous that this scene--the rather stiff German major, in strict, white, military uniform and an encumbering sword, a black sentry, not far away, walking with a plap, plap, plap of his bare feet up and down the prescribed number of paces; a plainly furnished, white-washed room in a square fort with pretentious crenellations along its high white walls; the oleograph portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II; the camp table, the Rhine wine in long-necked bottles, the enamelled iron tumblers and the soda siphons; and the click of a typewriter in the next apartment--should come up before his mental vision as he sat with Lucy and Maud and the Schraeder partners on a balcony in the Strand, waiting for Queen Victoria to pass to her Jubilee thanksgiving at St. Paul's! Why should he think of Adolf Stolzenberg then?

He was but part of the African nightmare which he would fain roll up and forget. A few weeks of England had put Africa's nose out of joint. To work for the redemption of a tiny portion of German Africa when such gigantic developments of British Africa were dawning in the imagination of far-seeing men, or when an evolution still more important was taking place in his own land, in the Far East, in America....

What was it that brought back the Red Crater to his mind, the sinister face and powerful figure of Stolzenberg; or the German Commandant in the fort at Kondoa? Whose was the thin, aquiline, insolent face with its riotous smile that held his gaze across the narrow Strand, the face of a tall man in ultra-fashionable cut of clothes, standing up amid a bower of Gaiety girls with four or five extra-smart young City men--stock-brokers, no doubt, Company promoters, or the solicitors of Company promoters--? It was Willowby Patterne he had been staring at for several minutes; and Sir Willowby was flicking a greeting to him with the manicured hand which had drawn the trigger on so many lovely beasts, or had lifted the Kiboko with such a cunning twist to lay its lash on the naked skin of some defaulting native porter....

He had to concentrate his thoughts before he replied to the greeting with a grave bow--had to remember that he had once played semi-host to this man at a Scotch shooting lodge; hated him mostly on hearsay unproved evidence, and chiefly on apprehension as to future maleficence, rather than on positive wrongs to himself.

Then he gave his consideration once more to the passing pageant.

Thrum ... thrum ... thrum ... thrum ... in between the bursts of military music went the steady marching of the Imperial troops. There was the pick of the regiments of the British line; there were samples of Indian infantry--bearded Sikhs, grinning Gurkhas, handsome Panjabis--Surely that was young Pearsall-Smith at the head of one of these detachments? He had heard of his distinguishing himself in the Nyasaland wars against the Arabs--and he winced to think he had no part in this ceremonial, he could point of late to no service to the Crown and Empire--was it his fault? If he had gone to Norway or to South America, could he have achieved anything that might have brought him into the procession of to-day? What splendid Indian cavalry. That Indian prince leading them had once given him some tiger shooting when he was a young A.D.C. to Sir Griffith Gaunt. Ah! Here was Africa in the procession--Hausas from Nigeria, Sudanese from Egypt; these bronzed, well-seated, rather insolent-looking white men were mounted police from the Cape, from Bechuanaland, from Natal.

These gaudy zouave uniforms and Christy minstrels' faces were a contingent from the West Indian regiments that had figured in so many West African wars. And now came well-set-up Turkish police from Cyprus, well-drilled Chinese police from Hong Kong; even solemn-looking Dyaks from Borneo, who were believed to have given up head-hunting in favour of constabulary work at the Bornean ports.

And carriages containing permanent officials--he thought he recognized Sir Bennet Molyneux in one, possibly attached to the person of some foreign prince, some German or Russian Grand Duke. And Ministers of State saluted by the happy crowd with good-humoured cheers and a few serio-comic groans. That one who aroused such an outburst of cheering was the great Choselwhit, Josiah Choselwhit, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in Windsor uniform with the customary eyeglass. His hosts, the Schraeders, joined lustily in the hurrahs, as did the City men opposite; Choselwhit was supposed to have brought grist to the City mills and to be the mainstay of the British Empire in which Germans as well as British made such millions of money....

And ... and ... and ... At last, after many preliminary princes and princesses, Queen Victoria herself; a little figure swathed in much black clothing but with filmy white around the rosy face and yellow-white hair.... She progressed very slowly--so it seemed to Roger--past their windows. The Schraeder brothers positively brayed their international loyalty, so that their voices were even heard by her above the deafening clamour. She turned her somewhat haughty profile and clear blue eyes towards their balcony with its flamboyant draperies and symbols, as if she searched for some face she knew to whom she might address a smile of acknowledgment; but finding none, turned her gaze to the Gaiety girls and the shouting young men who had invited Patterne as their guest. To these pretty actresses, showing real emotion, she did address a royal smile, which caused one of them to give way to real tears. Then Roger found himself gazing at the back of her bonnet with its white ostrich plume, illogically disappointed that there had been no smile for him, he who would have served her so gladly had her ministers let him.