reply to
her question she shook her head and said, "No, I cannot leave my
people. I must stay and do my best, even if Buckingham gets me, but
you must go at once. Do not wait until it is too late. The lions have
had no offering for a long time, and Buckingham would seize upon the
first stranger as a gift to them."

I did not perfectly understand what she meant, and was about to ask her
when a heavy body leaped upon me from behind, and great arms encircled
my neck. I struggled to free myself and turn upon my antagonist, but
in another instant I was overwhelmed by a half dozen powerful,
half-naked men, while a score of others surrounded me, a couple of whom
seized the girl.

I fought as best I could for my liberty and for hers, but the weight of
numbers was too great, though I had the satisfaction at least of giving
them a good fight.

When they had overpowered me, and I stood, my hands bound behind me, at
the girl's side, she gazed commiseratingly at me.

"It is too bad that you did not do as I bid you," she said, "for now it
has happened just as I feared--Buckingham has you."

"Which is Buckingham?" I asked.

"I am Buckingham," growled a burly, unwashed brute, swaggering
truculently before me. "And who are you who would have stolen my
woman?"

The girl spoke up then and tried to explain that I had not stolen her;
but on the contrary I had saved her from the men from the "Elephant
Country" who were carrying her away.

Buckingham only sneered at her explanation, and a moment later gave the
command that started us all off toward the west. We marched for a
matter of an hour or so, coming at last to a collection of rude huts,
fashioned from branches of trees covered with skins and grasses and
sometimes plastered with mud. All about the camp they had erected a
wall of saplings pointed at the tops and fire hardened.

This palisade was a protection against both man and beasts, and within
it dwelt upward of two thousand persons, the shelters being built very
close together, and sometimes partially underground, like deep
trenches, with the poles and hides above merely as protection from the
sun and rain.

The older part of the camp consisted almost wholly of trenches, as
though this had been the original form of dwellings which was slowly
giving way to the drier and airier surface domiciles. In these trench
habitations I saw a survival of the military trenches which formed so
famous a part of the operation o