ht on here.
You should get him to tell you the story.'

When dinner was over we lit our pipes, and Sir Henry proceeded
to give our host a description of our journey up here, over which
he looked very grave.

'It is evident to me,' he said, 'that those rascally Masai are
following you, and I am very thankful that you have reached this
house in safety. I do not think that they will dare to attack
you here. It is unfortunate, though, that nearly all my men
have gone down to the coast with ivory and goods. There are
two hundred of them in the caravan, and the consequence is that
I have not more than twenty men available for defensive purposes
in case they should attack us. But, still, I will just give
a few orders;' and, calling a black man who was loitering about
outside in the garden, he went to the window, and addressed him
in a Swahili dialect. The man listened, and then saluted and
departed.

'I am sure I devoutly hope that we shall bring no such calamity
upon you,' said I, anxiously, when he had taken his seat again.
'Rather than bring those bloodthirsty villains about your ears,
we will move on and take our chance.'

'You will do nothing of the sort. If the Masai come, they come,
and there is an end on it; and I think we can give them a pretty
warm greeting. I would not show any man the door for all the
Masai in the world.'

'That reminds me,' I said, 'the Consul at Lamu told me that he
had had a letter from you, in which you said that a man had arrived
here who reported that he had come across a white people in the
interior. Do you think that there was any truth in his story?
I ask, because I have once or twice in my life heard rumours
from natives who have come down from the far north of the existence
of such a race.'

Mr Mackenzie, by way of answer, went out of the room and returned,
bringing with him a most curious sword. It was long, and all
the blade, which was very thick and heavy, was to within a quarter
of an inch of the cutting edge worked into an ornamental pattern
exactly as we work soft wood with a fret-saw, the steel, however,
being invariably pierced in such a way as not to interfere with
the strength of the sword. This in itself was sufficiently curious,
but what was still more so was that all the edges of the hollow
spaces cut through the substance of the blade were most beautifully
inlaid with gold, which was in some way that I cannot understand
welded on to the steel {Endnote 5