s, and with Kazimoto's aid as interpreter, had fifty
ready to march that afternoon.

The whole trick of starting on a journey is to start. If you only make
a mile or two the first day you have at least done better than stand
still; loads have been apportioned and porters broken in to some
extent; you have broken the spell of inertia, and hereafter there is
less likely to be trouble. We made up our minds to get away that
afternoon, and I was sent back to the hotel to find Brown, who had gone
for his belongings.

If Brown had stayed sober all might have been well, but his headache
and feeling of unworthiness had been too much for him and I found him
with a straw in the neck of a bottle of whisky alternately laying down
law to Georges Coutlass and drinking himself into a state of temporary
bliss.

"You Greeks dunno nothin'!" he asserted as I came in. "You never did
know nothin', an' you're never goin' to know nothin'! 'Cause why?
'I'll tell you. Simply because I am goin' to tell! I'm mum, I am!
When s'mother gents an' me 'ave business, that's our business--see!
None o' your business--'ss our business, an' I'm not goin' to tell you
Greeks nothin' about where we're off to, nor why, nor when. An' you
put that in your pipe an' smoke it!"

I sat in the dining-room for a while, hoping that the Greek would go
away; but as Brown was fast drinking himself into a condition when he
could not have been moved except on stretcher, and was momentarily
edging closer to an admission of all he knew or guessed about our
intention, I took the bull by the horns at last--snatched away his
whisky bottle, and walked off with it.

He came after me swearing like a trooper, and his own porters, who had
been waiting for more than an hour beside his loads, trailed along
after him. Once in our camp we made a hammock for him out of a blanket
tied to a pole, and made him over to two porters with the promise that
they would get no supper if they lost him. Then we started--uphill,
toward the red Kikuyu heights, where settlers were already trying to
grow potatoes for which there was no market, and onions that would only
run to seed.

To our left rear and right front were the highest mountain ranges in
Africa. Before us was the pass through which the railway threaded over
the wide high table-land before dipping downward to Victoria Nyanza.
On our left front was all Kikuyu country, and after that Lumbwa, and
native reserves, and forest, and