bit the country seemed to grow
more normal, and I went into the foothills to shoot, fairly easy in my
mind. I had got up to a place called Shimonwe, on the Pathi river,
where I had ordered letters to be sent, and one night coming in from a
hard day after kudu I found a post-runner half-dead of fatigue with a
chit from Utterson, who commanded a police district twenty miles nearer
the coast. It said simply that all the young men round about him had
cleared out and appeared to be moving towards Deira, that he was in the
devil of a quandary, and that, since the police were under the
Governor, he would take his orders from me.

"It looked as if the heather were fairly on fire at last, so I set off
early next morning to trek back. About midday I met Utterson, a very
badly scared little man, who had come to look for me. It seemed that
his policemen had bolted in the night and gone to join the rising,
leaving him with two white sergeants, barely fifty rounds of
ammunition, and no neighbour for a hundred miles. He said that the
Labonga chiefs were not marching to the coast, as he had thought, but
north along the eastern foothills in the direction of the mines. This
was better news, for it meant that in all probability the railway would
remain open. It was my business to get somehow to my chief, and I was
in the deuce of a stew how to manage it. It was no good following the
line of the natives' march, for they would have been between me and my
goal, and the only way was to try and outflank them by going due east,
in the Deira direction, and then turning north, so as to strike the
railway about half-way to the mines. I told Utterson we had better
scatter, otherwise we should have no chance of getting through a
densely populated native country. So, about five in the afternoon I
set off with my chief shikari, who, by good luck, was not a Labonga,
and dived into the jungly bush which skirts the hills.

"For three days I had a baddish time. We steered by the stars,
travelling chiefly by night, and we showed extraordinary skill in
missing the water-holes. I had a touch of fever and got light-headed,
and it was all I could do to struggle through the thick grass and
wait-a-bit thorns. My clothes were torn to rags, and I grew so
footsore that it was agony to move. All the same we travelled fast,
and there was no chance of our missing the road, for any route due
north was bound to cut the railway. I had the most sickening