y well to supply
the camp. Moreover, day by day little parties of the slaves disappeared,
I presume to seek their own homes, so that when at last we entered the
borders of the Mazitu country there were not more than fifty of them
left, including seventeen of those whom we had taught to shoot.

Then it was that our real adventures began.

One evening, after three days' march through some difficult bush in
which lions carried off a slave woman, killed one of the donkeys and
mauled another so badly that it had to be shot, we found ourselves upon
the edge of a great grassy plateau that, according to my aneroid, was
1,640 feet above sea level.

"What place is this?" I asked of the two Mazitu guides, those same men
whom we had borrowed from Hassan.

"The land of our people, Chief," they answered, "which is bordered on
one side by the bush and on the other by the great lake where live the
Pongo wizards."

I looked about me at the bare uplands that already were beginning to
turn brown, on which nothing was visible save vast herds of buck such as
were common further south. A dreary prospect it was, for a slight rain
was falling, accompanied by mist and a cold wind.

"I do not see your people or their kraals," I said; "I only see grass
and wild game."

"Our people will come," they replied, rather nervously. "No doubt even
now their spies watch us from among the tall grass or out of some hole."

"The deuce they do," I said, or something like it, and thought no more
of the matter. When one is in conditions in which anything _may_ happen,
such as, so far as I am concerned, have prevailed through most of my
life, one grows a little careless as to what _will_ happen. For my part
I have long been a fatalist, to a certain extent. I mean I believe that
the individual, or rather the identity which animates him, came out from
the Source of all life a long while, perhaps hundreds of thousands or
millions of years ago, and when his career is finished, perhaps hundreds
of thousands or millions of years hence, or perhaps to-morrow, will
return perfected, but still as an individual, to dwell in or with that
Source of Life. I believe also that his various existences, here or
elsewhere, are fore-known and fore-ordained, although in a sense he may
shape them by the action of his free will, and that nothing which he can
do will lengthen or shorten one of them by a single hour. Therefore, so
far as I am concerned, I have always acted up to