presence
of us all; but hungry though we were all beginning to be, he refused,
and we needed his example.

After that first island we began to sail among a regular archipelago,
most of them scarcely better than granite rocks on which the crocodiles
could crawl to sun themselves, but some of them a half-mile long, or
longer. Nearly all of them were barren, but at last, when we judged
ourselves well inside the British portion of the lake, we came on a
very large one that had a mountain in the middle of it, and contained a
fair-sized village hidden among trees.

It was dark, and we were all famished when we reached it, so when we
had poled the dhow into a little bay between granite boulders big
enough to hide her, mast and all, we went ashore, made fires, and
served out the last handfuls of rice, skimping our own allowance to
increase those of the porters, whose larger stomachs afforded vaster
yearning power. They were pitiably meager rations--a mere jest--an
insult to hungry men; but we found before we had cooked and finished
them that we had witnesses who thought us fortunate.

They came so silently that even the porters did not notice them at
first--gaunt black shadows flitting in the deeper shadows, and coming
presently to squat outside the edge of the circle of firelight, until a
tribe, men, women and little children, were all gathered around us
burning up the darkness with their eyes.

They were hungrier than we! Our food, that looked so scant to us, to
them was a very feast of the gods! They all had pieces of leather or
plaited grass drawn tight around their middles to lessen the pangs of
hunger, and the chief, who sat rather apart from the rest, gnawed at a
piece of bark.

None of them wore any clothes. Those that had goat-skin aprons had
them on behind, and they were as free from self-consciousness as the
trees in winter. Some of them had spears, and they all had knives, yet
none offered violence, or as much as begged. There were three or four
hundred of them, at the lowest reckoning, yet they allowed us to finish
our meal in the dark in peace.

There was nothing to say when we had finished. We knew what the matter
was, and they knew we knew. We had nothing to share with them, and
they knew that, for they could see the empty rice bags that the porters
had shaken and beaten to get out the very dust. We did not know their
language; even Kazimoto professed himself ignorant of any dozen words
that c