m about accommodation.

"Keightley's--up yonder," he said. "That's the only hotel on the West
bank. There's a German shanty a mile or so higher up t'other bank, but
you'll be better here. Going on to `King,' I take it?"

"Where?"

"`King'--King Williamstown," he explained.

I was about to reply that I was a picked-up castaway, but thought better
of it in time. Such would be presumed to be destitute, and thus might
find initial difficulties as to accommodation. So I only answered that
that would do me.

Now a most weird noise attracted my attention, and I found that it
proceeded from a sight hardly less weird. Covering a ricketty jetty
which we were slowly approaching, a crowd of strange beings were
preparing for our reception after their own fashion. Some were clothed
in brick red blankets and some were clothed in nothing, but all were
smeared from head to foot with red ochre--and, as they swayed and
contorted, a thunder of deep bass voices accompanying the high yelling
recitative of him who led the chant, and beat time in measured stamping
on the boards, I wondered that the structure did not collapse and strew
the river with the lot of them. But their wild aspect and the grinning
and contortions gave me the idea of a crowd of hugely exaggerated
baboons in the last stage of drunken frenzy. But they were not drunk at
all. It was only the raw savage, disporting himself after his own form
of lightheadedness.

Up to this time my ideas as to the Kafir of South-Eastern Africa had
been vague. If I had thought of him at all it had been as a meek,
harmless kind of black, rather downtrodden than otherwise, and to whom a
kick and a curse would constitute a far more frequent form of reward
than a sixpence. But now as I stepped upon the jetty at East London, my
views on that head underwent a complete and lasting change. For these
ochre-smeared beings were brawny savages, at once powerful and lithe of
frame and with a bold independent look in their rolling eyes, which,
although their countenances were in the main good-humoured, seemed to
show that they were able and willing to hold their own if called upon to
do so. More than one of the group towered above me, and I am not short.
They crowded around, vociferating in their own tongue, and tried to
seize the bundle I carried--this, by the way, contained a change of
clothing which Morrissey had insisted on my accepting--and I began to
think of showing fight, when th