162 
THE KILIM A - NJA B 0 EXPEDITION. 
knives), which gives me “ Si-oso ” as the plural of 
“ ki-oso, 55 and consequently “ si” is the form of the 
eighth prefix, and so on. But half an hour 
soon exhausts their mental energies, and they 
are sent away with a present, while I go to my 
dinner. 
My little table has been laid with a snowy cloth, 
and the lamp placed on it spreads abroad its soft 
effulgence. My muddy boots are taken off, and my 
servant slips my feet into a pair of red morocco slip¬ 
pers that nestle into the skin rug just in front of my 
camp-chair. A pleasant book is placed at my side, 
and the gloom of the night and its weird children— 
the bats and the hawkmoths—are shut out by a heavy 
curtain, and I feel how pleasant and easy it is, even in 
Africa, to create an atmosphere of home. Here in 
three or four days my servants can build me a dwelling, 
and I can furnish it so that when my door is closed 
and my thoughts abstracted it needs an effort to 
realize that the wilderness lies outside. 
When my dinner, a meal of three courses—soup, 
meat, and honey dumplings—is finished, the cloth is 
cleared, the lamp trimmed, and the door closed for the 
night. Then for two hours I sit and write my diary, 
much in fact of what I am rewriting now. But at 
length my eyelids grow heavy, I find my head nodding 
over the book, so I relax from my labours, undress, 
and creep thankfully into my snug little bed. I feel 
as safe and as much at home as in a well-appointed 
English inn. Only the occasional wild laugh of a 
prowling hyena, slinking round our settlement, or the 
distant booming roar of the hungry lion, recall to me 
almost pleasantly, that I am lodging in the wilds of 
Africa. But slumber soon intervenes, and thus ends, 
