I suppose that their talk that night made a good deal of difference to the intimacy of their relation. No doubt it cost M‘Crae a considerable effort to speak of things which had been locked in his heart for years. As he himself said, “he was no great hand at talking.” With Eva it was different. The small things of which her life had been composed came to him easily, in the ordinary way of talking. Among them there were no passages of which it was difficult to speak; nothing in the very least exciting had ever happened to her before she had set foot in Africa, so few months before.

Since then, indeed, there was a great deal that was both difficult and puzzling. It was so great a relief to her to be able to speak of them that she told him everything, freely, withholding nothing. She told him how, at first, she had mistrusted the man Bullace: of the equivocal way in which he had spoken of Godovius.

“Bullace?” said M‘Crae, thinking, “Bullace. . . . I’m afraid I can’t help you. Although I know the name. It’s possible, even probable, that he drank; though I must tell you that he is the first missionary I’ve ever heard of who did. People at home talk more nonsense, I should imagine, about missionaries than about any other body of men. On the one side of their sacrifices. They do make sacrifices. We know that. But you must remember that a man who has once lived in the wilds of Africa doesn’t take kindly to life at home. They have their wives. They have children. That, I think, is a mistake. But there’s the other side; the people who laugh at all missionary work and talk about the folly of ramming Christianity down the throats of people who have good working religions of their own. They are just as wide of the mark as the others. I’ve known a good many missionaries; and for the most part I believe they’re neither worse nor better than their fellows. They’re just men. And men are mostly good . . . even the worst of them. If this poor fellow Bullace drank there’s a good deal to be said for him. Most Europeans who live in the tropics, particularly if they live alone in a place like Luguru, do drink. At one time—about the time of the Boer War—I drank about as much as any man could do and live. Loneliness—loneliness will drive a man to drink, if he hasn’t some strong interest to keep him going. I had Africa. Probably Bullace had nothing. I told you that I’ve heard strange things about the Waluguru. I daresay Bullace found that he was a failure . . . a hopeless failure, without any chance of getting away from the scene of his failure. And so he drank to kill time. I don’t altogether blame him . . .”

He talked to her also a good deal about James, and the particular side of the missionary problem which he had the misfortune to illustrate. It was a great relief to Eva that they were able to do this. In those earlier days when Godovius had appeared to her in the rÔle of a helper and adviser, they had often spoken of James and his troubles; but in this matter Godovius had been obviously unsympathetic: he hadn’t thought that James was worth Eva’s troubling about, and had therefore decided that the topic should be discreetly and swiftly shelved. M‘Crae was very different. He listened to Eva’s troubles without a hint of impatience, realising just how important they were to her. It flattered her to find herself taken seriously in little frailties of which she herself was not sure that she oughtn’t to be ashamed.

One evening, when confidences seemed to come most easily, she told him the whole story of her relations with Godovius: the first impressions of distrust which his kindness had removed, his bewildering outbursts of passion and at last the whole story of her visit to the House of the Moon. She told him, half smiling, of the frightening atmosphere of her journey, of Godovius’s amazing room, of the shock which his photograph had given her. It astonished her to find how easy it was to confide in this man.

He listened attentively, and at last pressed her to tell him again of the terraces on the side of the hill; and the abandoned building of stone from which the doves had fluttered out.

She told him all that she remembered. “But why do you want to know?” she said.“It is very curious,” he replied, “very curious. When we rode up into Rhodesia in 1890 we came across the same sort of thing. But on a bigger scale. It’s likely you’ll not have heard of it, but there are great ruins there that they call the Zimbabwes, about which the learned people have been quarrelling ever since. They’re near the site of the Phoenician gold workings—King Solomon’s Mines—and they’re supposed to be connected with the worship of the Syrian goddess, Astarte, of whom your brother could tell you more than I can. But I take it she was a moon goddess by her symbols. And it’s curious because of the way in which it fits in here. Kilima ja Mweze. . . . The mountain of the moon. Godovius’s home, too. And the strange thing is that it tallies with the stories which I heard from the Masai about the Waluguru; the stories that brought me over into this country.”

“It was the night of the new moon when I went there,” she said. “And Onyango was afraid to go to the Waluguru for the same reason.”

He said: “Yes . . . it’s a matter that needs thinking over.” And then, after a long pause: “But I’m thankful that I came here.”

“For my sake,” she said softly. He only smiled.

After that they did not speak of Godovius for a long time. I think those evenings must have been very wonderful for both of them; for it is doubtful if either M‘Crae or Eva had ever shared an intimacy of this kind. In it there was no hint of love-making. The extraordinary candour of their relation made impossible the bashfulness and misunderstanding out of which love-making so often springs. The difference of age between them made it unlikely that Eva should think of M‘Crae as a lover; and he was not a young man in whom the mere physical presence of a woman would awaken passion. Many years ago he had outgrown that sort of thing; so that the result of their intimacy was a wholly delightful relation, which resembled, in its frankness and freedom from the subconscious posings of sex, the friendship of two men or of a man and a woman happily married who have rid themselves of the first restlessness of passion. To Eva it seemed that this state of innocence might last for ever. To M‘Crae, who knew the workings of the human heart more widely, it seemed very beautiful, and very like her, that she should think so.

But if Eva realised no threat to their peace of mind in the shape of passion, she was certainly conscious of other dangers to their secret happiness. She knew that the day must come when the presence of M‘Crae would be revealed to James, who seemed, for the time, to have got the better of the fever in his blood. She dreaded this because she knew that when it came to that she must almost certainly lose M‘Crae; and the presence of M‘Crae had made her happier than she had ever been before at Luguru. James wouldn’t understand their position. She could be sure of that in advance. To say that James wasn’t capable of relieving her of the attentions of Godovius would not help matters much, for James had a good opinion of himself in the rÔle of the protecting male. The idea that his place should be taken by a one-armed elephant-hunter of the most doubtful antecedents, who had stolen into his house in the night while he lay sick with fever, would not appeal to him. Indeed, there was bound to be trouble with James.

I do not suppose that the question of what James’ attitude would be gave much worry to M‘Crae; but there was another threat to their peace of mind, of which they both were conscious and which could not be regarded so lightly. Godovius. . . . All the time Eva was conscious of him in the back of her mind, and particularly at night when she and M‘Crae sat in the banda talking. Then, from time to time, she would find herself overwhelmed with very much the same sort of feeling as that which she had experienced on the way down from Njumba ja Mweze, just before she had met M‘Crae. Now, as ever, the nights were full of restless sound; and every sound that invaded their privacy began to be associated with the idea of Godovius; so that when a branch rustled or a twig snapped at night she would never have been surprised to have seen Godovius standing over them. He had always had the way of appearing suddenly. She grew very nervous and jerky and, in the end, possessed by the idea that all their careful concealment was an elaborate waste of time; that Godovius knew perfectly well all that had happened from that night to this; that her precious secret wasn’t really a secret at all.

It would almost have been a relief to her if he had appeared, not only to save her from the anxiety of M‘Crae’s concealment, but because no material manifestation of his presence or his power could be half so wearing as the imponderable threat of his absence. For she knew that it had got to come. The story of his strange passion could not conceivably be ended by her flight from Njumba ja Mweze. She knew that he would not have let her go so lightly if he had not been confident that she couldn’t really escape from the sphere of his influence. It was as though he had said: “Flutter away, tire yourself out with flutterings. I’m quite prepared to wait for you. The end will be the same.” She could almost have wished that he had followed her in more passionate pursuit instead of nursing this leisurely appetite of a fat man who sits down in a restaurant waiting complacently for a meal which he has ordered with care.

II

In this way the weeks passed by. At last James was so far recovered that he was able to sit out on a long basket-chair upon the stoep, surveying the field of his labours. Every evening he would sit there until the sun set and the frogs began their chorus. His last experience of fever had made him a little fussy about himself; not so much for his own sake as because he knew that a few more attacks of this kind would make life impossible for him in that country. He might even be forced to leave it, a failure; and this humiliating prospect made him unusually careful. When he had sat on the stoep for a few evenings he began to try his legs. He walked, leaning upon Eva’s arm, the length of the garden beneath the avenue of the acacias. In those days he seemed to Eva increasingly human. Indeed, this was the nearest she ever came to loving him. “I’d no idea,” he said, “what miracles you had been performing in this garden. I’ve been too absorbed in my work—selfishly, perhaps—to notice them before.” He showed a childish interest in fruits and flowers which he had never taken the trouble to observe before. “When you have been ill indoors,” he said, “everything that grows seems somehow . . . I can’t get the right word—the fever has done that for me . . . somehow fresh. Almost hopeful.”

They were standing together at the far end of the garden, so near to the banda that Eva knew that M‘Crae must hear everything that was said. Indeed, M‘Crae was listening. “Do you know, Eva,” he heard James say, “I’ve never been inside your summer-house. It must be cool—beautifully cool on these hot afternoons. Better than the house. Do you remember the summer-house at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest? You’d never let anyone use that.” M‘Crae heard Eva laugh softly. “And this one’s the same,” she said. “You mustn’t be jealous, for you’ve got our best room for your study.” Her voice trembled a little at the end of the sentence. M‘Crae realised that she was frightened for him. It disturbed him to think that a creature so beautifully innocent as Eva should be forced into dissimulation for his sake. The experience of the last few weeks seemed to have made him surprisingly sensitive on matters of honour; a curious phenomenon at his time of life. He tackled Eva the same evening.

“James would have come into the banda,” she said. “You never know what might happen. Probably he would have wanted to look through into your part of it. And then . . .”

“What would you have done?”

“I should have stopped him somehow; I should have told him some story or other.” She became acutely conscious of his eyes on her face and blushed. “Yes, I should have told a lie,” she said, “if that is what you mean.”

He shook his head. “Things will get more and more difficult,” he said. “For you, I mean. Now that I can look after myself, I don’t think I ought to stay in your banda.”

He waited a long time for her reply. She sat there with downcast eyes; and when, at last, she raised them, even though she was smiling, they were full of tears. It was a very sweet and dangerous moment. She heard the voice of James calling her from the stoep, and was glad of the excuse to leave him.

These were trying days for all of them. James didn’t pick up very quickly. The weather had begun to show a variation from a type that is not altogether uncommon in the neighbourhood of isolated mountain patches such as the Luguru Hills. The time about dawn was as fresh and lovely as ever, but as the day wore on the heavy mood with which noon burdened the countryside increased. Upon the wide horizon companies of cloud massed and assembled, enormous clouds, as black and ponderable as the mountains themselves. By the hour of sunset they would threaten the whole sky and ring it round as though they were laying particular siege to the Mission Station itself and must shortly overwhelm it in thunder and violent rain. Beneath this menace the sunsets were unusually savage and fantastic, lighting such lurid skies as are to be found in mediÆval pictures of great battle-fields or of hell itself. These days were all amazingly quiet: as though the wild things in the bush were conscious of the threatening sky, and only waited for it to be broken with thunder or ripped with lightning flashes. With the descent of darkness this sense of anticipation grew heavier still. It was difficult to sleep for the heat and for the feeling of intolerable pressure. But when morning came not one shred of cloud would mar the sky.

As I have said, it was trying weather for all of them. For James, who read in the sunset apocalyptic terrors; for M‘Crae, sweating in the confined space of Bullace’s banda; for Eva, who found in the skies a reinforcement of that sense of dread and apprehension with which the menace of Godovius oppressed her. Still it would not rain and still Godovius did not come . . .

One evening M‘Crae said to her suddenly:

“I never hear your Waluguru boys working near the banda now. I suppose you’ll have kept them at the other end of the garden for my sake?”

She told him that she was always frightened when anyone came near him.“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “At the worst, nothing very serious could happen. But I want you to keep them working near me. I think this sisal hedge at the back of the banda is badly in need of thinning. You can put them to weed it if you like. Any job that you like to give them, as long as they are working near me. I want to listen to them.”

“They will find out that you are here,” she said in a voice that was rather pitiable.

“I expect they know it already, but they probably don’t know that I can understand what they say when they are talking together. I am curious, as I told you, about the Waluguru. And I’m curious about Godovius too.”

Next day she put the boys to work upon a patch of sweet potatoes under the sisal hedge. In the evening when she came to M‘Crae she could see that he had heard something. For all his hard experience of life he was a very simple soul. Once or twice when she spoke to him he had to wait a second to remember the echo of her question, and she quickly saw that his mind would really rather have been thinking of something else. This was the only sign of his preoccupation. In every other way he was his solemn self, taking everything that she said with a seriousness which was sometimes embarrassing. She didn’t want always to be taken in such deadly earnest, and now it seemed to her almost as if he were taking advantage of this peculiarity to evade her. She wasn’t going to have that.“You might just as well tell me first as last,” she said.

At this he was honestly surprised. “But how do you know I have anything to tell you?”

“You are so easy to understand,” she said.

He smiled and looked at her, wondering. It had never exactly struck him that a woman could understand him so completely. Of course he knew nothing about women, but for all that he had always been completely satisfied that there wasn’t much to know.

“You want me to tell you things that I’m not even sure of myself,” he said.

“All the more reason . . . for I might help you.”

He shook his head. “No. . . . I have to think it out myself, to piece a lot of things together: what I heard from the Masai: what I hear from you, the things I’ve heard the Waluguru talking about to-day. I can’t tell you until I’m satisfied myself . . .”

She said: “You think I’m simply curious . . .” and blushed.

“No,” he said, “you mustn’t think that. You’re so straight. You need never think that for one moment. Even if it were difficult I should be perfectly straight with you. We began that way. We mustn’t ever be anything else. Or else . . . or else there’d be an end of . . . of what makes our friendship unlike any other that I have known. I shall never hide anything from you. Do you understand? Is that quite clear?”

She said: “Yes, I understand. I feel like that too . . .”“Oh, but you . . .” he said. And he couldn’t say any more. It was not seldom that he found himself at a loss for words in his dealings with Eva.

For two or three days M‘Crae lay close to the grass wall of his banda, listening to the talk of the boys. For the most part it was a thankless and a straining task; for they talked nearly always of things which had no part in his problem: of their own life under the leaves, of James, whom they had christened N’gombe, or Ox, for the obvious reason that he was a vegetarian. Only here and there could he pick out a sentence that referred to Sakharani—it was certain that the Waluguru were afraid to speak of him—but in the end he learned enough to confirm the story of the Masai: that the Waluguru were a people among whom an old religion, connected in some way with the procreative powers of nature and the symbol of the waxing moon, survived; that this faith and its rites were associated by tradition with the hill named Kilima ja Mweze, on which the house of Godovius was built, and that a white man, now identified with Sakharani, was in some way connected with its ritual. How this might be, M‘Crae could not imagine; for the thing seemed to him contrary to all nature. There was no reason for it that he could see, and the mind of M‘Crae worked within strictly logical boundaries. He hadn’t any conception of the kind of brain which filled Godovius’s head. He simply knew that to the Waluguru he was the power they feared most on earth, as a savage people fears its gods. He was anxious to know more; this was exactly the sort of adventure for which he had lived for thirty years.

One other thing troubled him. He was certain that at some time or other he had heard a story about Godovius which now he couldn’t remember; he could not even remember when or where he had heard it. But one morning, when the light which penetrated the grass walls of his banda wakened him, it suddenly returned to him; suddenly and so clearly that he wondered how he could ever have forgotten it. It concerned a woman: in all probability the woman in the photograph which Eva had seen. Of her origin he knew nothing, nor even how she had come to live with Godovius. In those days there had been another man at Njumba ja Mweze, a planter, expert in coffee, who had ordered the cultivation of Godovius’s terraced fields. His name was Hirsch. He had rather fancied himself as an artist in the violent Bavarian way, and it was probable that the pictures of native women on Godovius’s walls were his work. One day while the Waluguru were clearing the bush from a new patch of coffee-ground near the house they had disturbed and killed a big black mamba, one of the most deadly of African snakes. He had brought it into the house to show Godovius, who straightway discovered in it the making of an excellent practical joke. For the woman who shared their house had always lived in dread of snakes, and the dead monster coiled in her bed might very well give her a pretty fright. The joke was carefully arranged, the woman sent to bed by candlelight and the door of her room locked by Godovius as soon as she had entered. They had waited outside to listen to her shrieks of terror and she had shrieked even louder and longer than they had expected. An altogether admirable entertainment. At last she stopped her shrieking. They supposed that she had suddenly appreciated the humour of the situation. They thought that she would come out and tell them so; but she didn’t—and Godovius, supposing that she was sulking, unlocked the door and went in to console her. She was lying on the bed, very white, beside the dead snake; and there was a living snake there too, which slid away through the window when Godovius entered the room. It was the mate of the dead mamba which had followed the scent of its comrade into the room and attacked the woman as soon as she appeared. She died the same evening. No one that has been bitten by a black mamba lives. It was an unpleasant story and probably would never have been known if Godovius had not quarrelled with Hirsch a few months later. Hirsch had told it to a couple of men who had come through on a shooting trip at Neu Langenburg, in the hotel where he eventually drank himself to death; for he never returned to Munich, being barely able to keep himself in liquor with the money which he earned by painting indecent pictures for the smoking-rooms of farmers on remote shambas. M‘Crae had heard the yarn in Katanga. A horrible business; but one hears many strange things, and stranger, between the Congo and German East. Now, remembering it, he thought of the pathetic figure in the photograph which had shocked Eva. And this time the thing seemed more real to him, even if it had little bearing on the dangers of their present situation. He realised that he was beginning to be sentimental to a degree on the subject of women. And when he thought of women in the abstract it was easy to find a concrete and adorable example in the shape of Eva herself. He smiled at himself rather seriously, remembering his age, his vagrant way of life, his tough, battered body, the disfigurement of his lopped arm.

III

On an evening of unparalleled heaviness Godovius came at last to Luguru. He rode down in the stifling cooler air which passed for evening, tied his pony to the post of the gate and, crossing the front of the stoep on which James languished without notice, made straight for the sand-paved avenue of flamboyant trees where he knew that Eva would be found. This time there was no question of her running away from him. He came upon her midway between the house and M‘Crae’s banda, and she would have done anything in the world to prevent him approaching nearer to this danger-point. She stood still in the path waiting for him. It was a moment when the light of the sun was hidden by monstrous tatters of black cloud, and this suppression of the violence of white light intensified for a while a great deal of rich colour which might never have been seen in the glare of day; the tawny sand with which the avenue was floored, the rich green of the acacia leaves, the inky hue of those imminent masses of cloud . . . even the warm swarthiness of Godovius’s face: the whole effect being highly coloured and fantastic as befitted this scene of melodrama. There is no doubt but that it showed Eva herself to advantage. Godovius paused to admire.

“The light of storms becomes you, Miss Eva,” he said, smiling. “Nature conspires to show you at advantage . . . to advantage . . .”

It seemed to her strangely unsubtle that he should talk to her in this way; for she was sure that he knew perfectly well what she was feeling. Why should they trouble themselves with such elaborate pretence? She said:

“Why have you come here?”

“You mean: ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ You expected me?”

“Yes, I expected you. But I didn’t want you to come.”

He laughed. “Very well,” he said. “We won’t pretend that you did; but for all that I think you used me roughly the other night. Your departure was . . . shall we say . . . lacking in ceremony. Unreasonably so, I think. For what had I done? What confidence had I abused?”

She shook her head. “You must not ask me to explain,” she said. “You won’t press me to do so. I wish you hadn’t come now. It will be a good deal better if you will leave us alone. I think we should go our own ways. It will be better like that. I wish you would go now . . .”“But that is ridiculous,” he said. “In as desolate place like this you can’t quarrel about nothing with your only neighbour. In the middle of a black population it is necessary that the whites should keep together. Your brother would understand. I don’t think you realise what it means. I’ll tell you what it means. . . . And yet I don’t think there is anything to be gained by that. It is you who must tell me what is the matter with you. Tell me why you were frightened where there was nothing to fear. What were you frightened of?”

She would not answer him. He became agitated and spoke faster.

“I suppose you were frightened of me. Oh, you were very clever. . . . But why should you have been frightened? Because of the name of Sakharani, the ridiculous name that I told you. Because you thought I was drunk? I told you, long ago, that there was more than one way of drunkenness. Ah well, to-night it is a drunken man that you face. Listen to me, how I stammer. How the words will not come. You see, I am drunk . . . burning drunk. You who stand there like a statue, a beautiful statue of snow, can’t the tropics melt you? . . . How long have I waited for this day!”

There came to her a sudden glow of thankfulness that this had not happened on that terrible night and in that strange house. Here, in the homeliness of her own garden, the situation seemed to have lost some of its terror.

And all the time, in the back of her mind, she was wanting to keep him away from the banda in which M‘Crae was lying. She said: “My brother is in the house. If you want him, I will show you the way.”

He would not let her pass.

“I don’t want to see your brother,” he said. “It is you that I want. That is why I came here. Why can’t you trust me? Why? You are not like your brother. . . . Your brother will be all right. You are meant for me. That is why you came here to Luguru; that was what brought you to me the other night. You don’t realise your beautiful youth . . . the use of life. You are like a cold, northern meadow in a dream of winter. You lie waiting for the sun. And I am like the sun. It is for you to awaken into spring. You don’t know the beauty of which you are capable. And you’ll never know it. You’ll never blossom in loveliness. You’ll waste your youth and your strength on your damned brother, and then you’ll marry, when there is no more hope, some bloodless swine of a clergyman like him. So to your death. You will have no life. Death is all they think of. And here is life waiting for you—life bursting, overflowing, like the life of the forest. You won’t have it. You will fly in the face of nature, you’ll fight forces stronger than yourself . . .”

His enthusiasm spent itself. He fell to tenderness. She was like a flower, he said, a fragile, temperate flower that he had tried to pluck as if it had been a great bloom of the forest. It had not been fair to her. So rein, und schÖn und hold. So like Eva. She must forget all his drunkenness. It was not thus that the spring sun beat upon the northern fields. More gently, more gently, and he was capable of gentleness too. No people were more gentle than the Germans, even as no people could be more magnificently passionate. “We feel more deeply than other races,” he said. “It is a fault, sometimes, but a magnificent fault.” He seemed to think that by this sudden change of tactics she must inevitably be softened.

She stood with face turned away, conscious of his outstretched hands.

She said: “When you have finished . . .”

“Ah . . . you think you have beaten me,” he said. “But what if I don’t let you go?”

“You will let me go,” she said. “You can’t frighten me as you did Hamisi. And you can’t keep me here. You know you can’t. It wouldn’t be decent or honourable.”

“There is no honour here,” he said. “You’re in the middle of Africa. No one can judge between us. . . . That is why you’re mad,” he added, with a gesture of impatience, “to waste your beauty, your life. Oh, mad . . .”

She would not reply to him.

“And there is another thing which you don’t remember. You don’t realise my power. Power is a good thing. I am fond of it. I possess it. In this place I am as reverenced as God. In another way I am as powerful as the Deity; there is nothing that is hidden from me. Now do you see, now do you see how you stand? Think. . . . You love your brother? So . . . your brother is in my hands. This mission is only here because I allow it. If I will that it succeed, it will succeed. If I decide that it shall fail, it will fail. I can break your brother. If you love him it will be better for us to be friends. And that is not all . . .”

He waited and she knew what was coming. She felt that she was going to cry out in spite of herself. She heard herself swallow.

“I know other things. I happen to know exactly how much your pretence of immaculate virtue is worth. We have always known that the first characteristic of the English is hypocrisy. Do you think I don’t know all about the guest in your banda? No doubt the news would entertain your brother, who is already shocked by the morals of the Waluguru. A very pretty little romance, which has no doubt been more amusing to you than it would have been to him. I believe your missionaries are very particular on the point of personal example, and it is possible that he would . . . shall we say? . . . disapprove. Oh, but you need not be frightened. I shall not tell him, unless it happens to suit me. As a nation we are very broad-minded. We do not preach. And I do not condemn you. That is the most orthodox Christianity. It is natural that a young and beautiful woman should have a lover. It is natural that she should have more than one lover. I am gentleman enough not to grudge you your romance, even if I don’t altogether approve your taste. So, now that your pretence of indignant virtue is disposed of, there is a possibility that you will be natural. I am not unreasonable. I merely ask that I may share these distinguished privileges. Obviously no harm can be done. I am content to be one of . . . as many as you wish. Women have found me a lover not wholly undesirable. I am not old, or unappreciative of your beauty. Now you will understand.”

She understood.

“You have nothing to say? I have sprung a little surprise on you? Very well. I am sufficiently gallant not to hurry you. You shall think it over. A week will give you time to think. It is always a shock for a virtuous woman to realise. . . . But we will leave it at that. You will see that I am neither jealous nor ungenerous. You have an opportunity of doing a good turn to your brother and to the man in whom, to my mind, you are so unreasonably interested. One may be magnanimous. You call it ‘playing the game.’ You shall think it over, and then we shall come to an agreement—but you wouldn’t be so foolish as not to do so—certain unavoidable things will happen; as unavoidable as if they were acts of God. I am God here. And you will have yourself to thank. So, for the present, we’ll say ‘Auf Wiedersehn.’ Perhaps you would like to return to your friend in the banda. He will help you to make up your mind. You can tell him that this is a bad place for ivory. The elephants played the devil with my plantations and were all killed years ago. When he wants to go back he had better apply to me for his porters. As to whether he’ll have any further need for porters . . . well, that’s for you to decide. His fate is in your very beautiful hands.”

With this he left her.