THE PASS TERRIBLE. 



213 



edly not to spread reports of our illness, and I saw them 

 depart with regret. It had really been a relief to hear 

 once more the voice of civility and sympathy. 



The great labour still remained. Trembling with 

 ague, with swimming heads, ears deafened by weakness, 

 and limbs that would hardly support us, we contem- 

 plated with a dogged despair the apparently perpen- 

 dicular path that ignored a zigzag, and the ladders of 

 root and boulder, hemmed in with tangled vegetation, up 

 which we and our starving drooping asses were about to 

 toil. On the 10th September we hardened our hearts, and 

 began to breast the Pass Terrible. My companion was 

 so weak that he required the aid of two or three sup- 

 porters; I, much less unnerved, managed with one. After 

 rounding in two places wall-like sheets of rock — at their 

 bases green grass and fresh water were standing close to 

 camp, and yet no one had driven the donkeys to feed — 

 and crossing a bushy jungly step, we faced a long steep of 

 loose white soil and rolling stones, up which we could see 

 the Wanyamwezi porters swarming, more like baboons 

 scaling a precipice than human beings, and the asses fall- 

 ing after every few yards. As we moved slowly and 

 painfully forwards, compelled to lie down by cough, 

 thirst, and fatigue, the " sayhah " or war-cry rang loud 

 from hill to hill, and Indian files of archers and spear- 

 men streamed like lines of black ants in all directions 

 down the paths. The predatory Wahumba, awaiting the 

 caravan's departure, had seized the opportunity of driving 

 the cattle and plundering the villages of Inenge. Two 

 passing parties of men, armed to the teeth, gave us this 

 information; whereupon the negro "Jelai" proposed, 

 fear-maddened — a sauve qui peut — leaving to their fate 

 his employers, who, bearing the mark of Abel in this land 

 of Cain, were ever held to be the head and front of all 



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