indefinable, yet unescapable air of rather
long disuse.

Resisting the first temptation to hurry along the shore and examine it,
they returned to camp to tell me of the find, and sent Simba,
Kazimoto's understudy, to find out whose the dhow was and why it lay
there. They explained it was a fairly big dhow, and might be laid up
there on account of leakiness.

But Simba came back grinning with the news that the dhow belonged to an
Indian from British East who had been jailed for smuggling. The dhow
had been sold to pay his court fine, and was now owned by a Punjabi who
had bought it as a speculation and repented already of his bargain,
because the Germans would grant him no license to use it and nobody
else would buy.

They went off again to have another distant view of it and to try and
invent some means of inspecting it closely without betraying their
purpose. I was already able to walk with the aid of a stick, although
not fast enough to keep up with them, and curiosity taking hold of me I
called two of our servants to give me a supporting arm and limped off
to see the grave the chain-gang had recently dug for me.

It was a struggle to get there, but it seemed to me the trip was worth
it. I found the grave about a foot too short, but otherwise
commensurate, and sat down on a stone beside it to consider a number of
things. A convalescent man sitting beside his own grave may be
forgiven for amusing himself with a lot of near-philosophy, and if I
trespassed over the borders of common sense on that occasion I claim it
was not without excuse.

My meditations were disturbed by the arrival on the scene of the very
last man I expected. We had been told that Professor Schillingschen
had gone out on a journey, leaving his "wife" in the care of the
commandant; yet I looked up suddenly to see him standing on the other
side of the grave with both hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers
and a grin of malevolent amusement showing through the tangled mass of
hair that hid his lower face.

"Yours?" he asked.

I nodded.

"A close call! I have seen closer! I have stood so close to the brink
of death that the width of an eyelash would have damned me!"

"Piffle!" I answered rudely. "How can the already damned be damned
again?"

He laughed.

"You are sick still. You are petulant. Never mind. I was coming to
call on you. I watched you leave the camp from the top of that hill
behind you, and followed. It is be