red up
the slope to find the corporal grinning at him. He turned his back and lay
down. There was no shade; only short scrub and grass. Small sand flies
buzzed and stung. He heard the gurgle of the corporal's military
water-bottle. But this time the sting was extracted; his belly was moist.

Birnier stretched out, shielding from the glare the little that he could
with his hands. Faint echoes of "a toi" strolled across his field of
consciousness. He observed the apparently stoical indifference of Mungongo
squatted a few feet from him, a soldier sprawling between them; but he
cursed because investigations had taught him that that "stoical" should
usually be read as "bovinity," as he had termed it; and he smiled dismally
at the ancient story that so well illustrated the point, of the peasant
who expressed his occupation through the long winter hours as "sometimes
we sits and thinks but mostly we just sits."

Mungongo "just sits," he repeated, and envied him. Yet in that heat and
hunger, waiting for his savage captor to wreak some new fancy upon him, so
saturated with philosophic interest in life was Birnier, that he wandered
off into a meditation upon the mechanical fatuity of human conduct;
illustrating his reflections by his own actions when stirred by emotion.
"The loaded gun may be as wise as Solomon was reputed to be," he remarked
beneath his hands, "but all the same when some one pulls the trigger the
damn thing goes off," and sat up to confront the muzzle of the corporal's
rifle, who was ordering him to get up. Birnier rose. But to the savage's
amazement, he smiled.

The corporal backed away.

"Ah, my friend," remarked Birnier blandly in English. "You've lost, for I
have found that which was lost!"

The corporal scowled and bade him to follow. Birnier obeyed but he felt
that he was obliging the man. The carriers had arrived and the green tent
was pitched, invitingly cool against the grey flood of the river. He
followed the corporal gladly, but at ten feet from his tent, beside a
thorn bush four feet tall which spread in a fan shape, he was bidden to
sit. For the moment, newly arrived from his philosophic dreams, he did not
comprehend.

"But that is my tent!" he said in Kiswahili.

"Sit down!" commanded the corporal, grinning. "The white seller of slaves
sits in the place of the slave, but his owner dwells in the place of the
blessed."

"O God!" remarked Birnier as he bumped his head against black reality.