trees. They carried food for two weeks.

Emerging from the forests, they saw the lowlands steaming in the heat;
for while it was winter in America, here it was summer.

They traversed plateaux that were dotted with islets of jungle, plains
covered with flowers and drenched with torrential rains, misty marshes
that suggested landscapes of the Paleozoic Age. They saw sodden herds
of zebras, the tracks of leopards, acacia trees uprooted by elephants.
In a glade filled with blossoms of every color they came upon a family
of lions, one of which they headed off and deftly killed with their
spears.

The plumes of the warriors bobbed along in single file; at sunset the
spear blades seemed still wet with blood. They raised their long
shields, adorned with crude geometrical designs, and sang for the white
man a rambling song of parting.

"But he will return some day to bask in the countenance of
Muene-Motapa."

They all took up the refrain:

"To bask in the countenance of Muene-Motapa!"

Their voices rose strongly, full of exultation. On a branch above
them, a python, awakened by those vibrations, revealed itself in an
iridescent gliding of its coils.

Suddenly, on the edge of a jungle of bamboo, they stood still. Far off
appeared the bastions of a fort, of whitewashed stone, mottled and
streaked with green. A flag was hanging limply from the flagstaff.

His two shadows, in bidding him farewell, began to weep, their tears
running over the white grease paint with which their cheeks were
bedaubed. They turned away with a choking cry:

"Farewell!"

"Farewell!" all the other warriors uttered in unison, fiercely, at the
top of their voices. Their howl passed over his head, like a defiance,
toward the distant fort.

So Lawrence Teck returned to civilization.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The commandant of the district, a melancholy, flaccid man with a
saffron-colored visage that looked like a half-deflated balloon, a
martyr to prickly heat, anaemia, and monotony, peered up from under the
moving punkah, to inquire of his subordinate in the doorway:

"He is still sitting there alone?"

"In the same position," the subordinate assented.

"I wish now that I hadn't shown it to him," said the commandant of Fort
Pero d'Anhaya, the district judge, the chief of the public works, the
receiver of taxes, the collector of revenues, the postmaster, the poor
exile prematurely aged by the African sun, the sorry "hero on the
ou