e any one's
as soft as that surely! They'll be lucky if they get ten per cent. of
it themselves! Man alive, but they say there's a whale of a hoard of
it! Hundreds o' tons of ivory, all waiting to be found, and fossicked
out, an' took! Say--if I was some o' those Greeks for instance, tell
you what I'd do: I'd off to Zanzibar, an' kidnap Tippoo Tib. The old
card's still living. I'd apply a red-hot poker to his silver-side an'
the under-parts o' his tripe-casings. He'd tell me where the stuff is
quicker'n winking! Supposin' I was a Greek without morals or no
compunctions or nothin', that's what I'd do! I don't hold with
allowin' any man to play dog in the manger with all that plunder!"

"Have you a notion where the stuff might be?" Fred wondered guilelessly.

"Ah! That 'ud be tellin'!"

We had crossed the water that divides Mombasa from the mainland.
Behind us lay the prettiest and safest harbor on all that
thousand-league-long coast; before us was the narrow territory that
still paid revenue and owed nominal allegiance to the Sultan of
Zanzibar, although really like the rest of those parts under British
rule. We were bowling along beside plantations of cocoanut, peanut,
plantain and pineapple, with here and there a thicket of strange trees
to show what the aboriginal jungle had once looked like. When we
stopped at wayside stations the heat increased insufferably, until we
entered the great red desert that divides the coast-land from the
hills, and after that all seemed death and dust, and haziness, and hell.

At first we passed occasional baobabs, with trunks fifteen or twenty
feet thick and offshoots covering a quarter of an acre. Then the trees
thinned out to the sparse and shriveled all-but-dead things that
struggle for existence on the border-lines between man's land and
desolation. At last we drew down the smoked panes over the window to
escape the glare and sight of the depressing desolation.

The sun beat down on the iron roof. The heat beat up from the tracks.
Red dust polluted the drinking water in the little upright tank. Dust
filled eyes, nostrils, hair. Dust caked and grew stiff in the sweat
that streamed down us. Yet we stopped once at a station, and humans
lived there and a man got off the train. A lone lean babu and his
leaner, more miserable native crew came out and eyed the train like
vultures waiting for a beast to die. But we did not die, and the train
passed on into illimitab