hey found the Ochori city deserted save for a
strong guard, for Bosambo had marched the day previous; sending a war
call through the country.

He had started with a thousand spears, and his force was growing in
snowball fashion as he progressed through the land. The great road which
Notiki, the northern chief, had started by way of punishment was
beginning to take shape. Bosambo had moved with incredible swiftness.

Too swift, indeed, for a certain Angolian-Congo robber who had headed a
villainous pilgrimage to a land which, as he had predicted, flowed with
milk and honey; was guarded by timorous men and mainly populated by slim
and beautiful maidens. The Blue Books on this migration gave this man's
name as Kisini, but he was in fact an Angolian named Bizaro--a composite
name which smacks suspiciously of Portuguese influence.

Many times had the unruly people and the lawless bands which occupied
the forest beyond the Ochori threatened to cross into British territory.
But the dangers of the unknown, the awful stories of a certain white
lord who was swift to avenge and monstrously inquisitive had held them.
Year after year there had grown up tribes within tribes, tiny armed
camps that had only this in common, that they were outside the laws
from which they had fled, and that somewhere to the southward and the
eastward were strong forces flying the tricolour of France or the yellow
star of the Belgian Congo, ready to belch fire at them, if they so much
as showed their flat noses.

It would have needed a Napoleon to have combined all the conflicting
forces, to have lulled all the mutual suspicions, and to have moulded
these incompatible particles into a whole; but, Bizaro, like many
another vain and ambitious man, had sought by means of a great palaver
to produce a feeling of security sufficiently soothing to the nerves and
susceptibilities of all elements, to create something like a nationality
of these scattered remnants of the nations.

And though he failed, he did succeed in bringing together four or five
of the camps, and it was this news carried to the French Governor by
spies, transmitted to Downing Street, and flashed back again to the
Coast, which set Hamilton and his Houssas moving; which brought a
regiment of the King's African Rifles to the Coast ready to reinforce
the earlier expedition, and which (more to the point) had put Bosambo's
war drums rumbling from one end of the Ochori to the other.

Bizaro, mu