290 
THE NEW AFRICA 
untravelled by white men, without the consent or knowledge 
of their king, an act in itself leading to suspicious inferences at 
the best of times. To them the explanation we gave of being 
simply travellers who were neither hunters nor traders seemed on 
the face of it so ridiculous an excuse that they never believed 
such unprofitable undertakings possible. This fact told heaviest 
of all against us; we must be spies and our tales all lies. We 
could be in the country for no good, and these fairly reasonable 
arguments nearly cost us our lives. 
In the early evening Mashabie returned to our camp with a 
man who, we thought afterwards, might have been the king, 
although he denied it when asked later. They sat and talked a 
little while with us, and then the stranger ordered us to remain 
camped at the base of the tree, and not to venture beyond the 
distance the shadow fell. This ominous order aroused my 
suspicions that all was not right, although Hammar was of the 
opposite opinion. I therefore went about one hundred yards away 
and pitched my mosquito tent by itself, and there slept alone, 
for the reason that if they wanted me personally they could 
have me without any trouble, and also in order to be out of 
the way of a possible salvo fired promiscuously into the camp 
from the neighbouring thicket. Any attempt at self-defence 
was out of the question against a tribe of five thousand warriors. 
Therefore our only hope of safety lay in cool submission. 
How correctly I had summed up the position, Stremboom’s 
tale too clearly demonstrated. Our fate that night hung on the 
noble exertions of the disinterested Mashabie, Stremboom and 
Umkook. Of all the trouble that happened at the king’s kraal 
of course we knew nothing till later, but I gathered from the 
disappearance of several useful articles early in the evening, 
such as pots, etc., that we were looked upon as a party from 
whom effects could be taken with impunity, a not re-assuring 
circumstance for men in our position. 
We were up with the daybreak, and while preparing our 
breakfast, shot from the flocks of duck swarming on the borders 
of the lake, a message came to us from the king to hold our- 
