o race for the shore with as
little rest and as little sleep as the men could do with.

However, we were not noticeably better off when we first set foot on
shore. There was nothing but short grass growing on the thin soil that
only partly hid the volcanic rock and manganese iron ore. Victoria
Nyanza is the crater of a once enormous, long ago extinct volcano, and
we stood on a shelf of rock about a thousand feet below what had been
the upper rim--a chain of mountains leading away toward the north
higher and higher, until they culminated in Mount Elgon, another
extinct volcano fourteen thousand feet above sea level.

It was not unexplored land where we stood, but it was so little known
that the existence of white men was said to be a matter of some doubt
among natives a mile or two to either side of the old safari route that
passed from east to west. We could see no villages, although we
marched for hours, the loaned canoe-men tagging along behind us,
hungrier than we, until at last over the back of a long low spur we
spied the tops of growing kaffir corn.

At sight of that we broke into a run and burst on the field of grain
like a pack of the dog-baboons that swoop from the hills and make
havoc. We seized the heads of grain, rubbed them between our hands,
and had munched our fill before we were seen by the jealous owners. A
small boy herding hump-backed cattle down in the valley watched us for
a minute, and then deserted his charge to report to the village hidden
behind a clump of trees. Ten minutes after that we were surrounded by
naked black giants, all armed with spears and a personal smell that
outstank one's notions of Gehenna.

We had nothing to offer them, except money, for which they obviously
had not the slightest use. None of us knew their language. From their
point of view we were thieves taken in the act, all but one of us
unarmed as far as they knew, to be judged by the tribal standard that
for more centuries than men remember has decreed that the thief shall
die. They were most incensed at the four unhappy islanders, probably
on the same principle that dogs pick on the weakest, and fight most
readily with dogs of a more or less similar breed.

It was Coutlass who saved that situation. He instantly went crazy, or
the next thing to it, wrinkling up his black-whiskered face into a
caricature, yelling a Greek monologue in a refrain consisting of five
notes repeated over and over, and dancing aro