CHAP. VIII ARABIAN LOGIC 



123 



Njemps, and send Omari into Elgeyo to purchase food, while 

 one of them would act as guide to him ; I asked which 

 of them would go, and they pointed out the very Arab whom 

 they had only just told me had that day come back from this 

 district at the request of his porters and slaves, as the natives 

 mistook him for a Mzungu (European) and would not sell him 

 food. I called their attention to this little inconsistency, and 

 was then shamelessly told that this incident had happened twelve 

 months before, and that the man was now blood-brother with all 

 the chiefs. I thought at first that they really only wanted to 

 make me buy my food from them at exorbitant rates, and so 

 determined to go on ; but, with an unfortunate excess of caution, 

 before breaking up the conference, I obtained from Timami as 

 exact a description as he could give of the place where Teleki 

 was said to have raided, I was quite certain that Teleki had 

 never even been there, and that his great fight for food took 

 place much farther to the north ; but the description tallied 

 precisely with the locality where Dr. Peters had performed one 

 of his marauding exploits, I attached no importance whatever 

 to the string of lies and contradictions I had detected in the 

 traders' statements, for they were but Orientals, and it would 

 have been absurd to expect in them a Teutonic sense of truth. 

 I was dealing with people among whom, as Mrs, Humphrey 

 Ward would put it, " the capacity for testimony has not 

 developed," I had to remember that their lies were possibly 

 not lying lies, uttered with an intention to deceive, but mere 

 dots and dashes honestly inserted to carry conviction of an 

 argument, otherwise truthful. So, though I had demonstrated 

 the falseness of their two premises, by showing that Teleki had 

 never been in the district in question, and that a man who had 

 just failed on his own account would not be likely to succeed 

 on mine, this did not blind me to the fact that in modern 

 Arabian logic the truth of the conclusion is in no way connected 

 with that of the premises. So, accepting with Mrs. Ward that 

 " the witness of the time is not true, nor, in the strict sense, 

 false ; it is merely incompetent, half-trained, pre-scientific," I 

 broke up the conference in order to talk things over with 

 Omari. 



I found that he also disbelieved the traders' statements of 

 facts, but feared there was some truth in their main argument, 



