lurking in the blackness of Pagan villages. His teacher had
deprecated violence; it was his rule never to strike, nor ever to
rule by such fear as cast out love.

Now, an askari (a native soldier) came up to the three, and he
was storming furiously. He laid on his lash right and left. Isaka
did not escape. They were to carry their loads at once, it was
said, by forced marches to a rice mill at the lakeside. In
another five minutes the big train of porters took the road, and
spread itself like a serpent up the trackway. Isaka was the
twentieth or the twenty-first in their advance. I do not think
that his illness which was to show itself in a day or two, was
really manifest on that day. Yet he went very heavily. Such
maladies were certainly upon him as a poet has diagnosed, 'blank
misgivings of a Creature moving about in worlds half realized.'
The ridings of Red and White Horses had so fast succeeded one
another in Isaka's circle, and had brought such different worlds
and atmospheres in their respective wakes!

The Riding of the Red Horse 253

III

Three days after, they were at the rice mill, and a July day was
breaking. Isaka lay and listened to the lapping of the lake water
lapping of the water in the greatest of African lakes. He was
lying beside a creek that was papyrus-fringed with curtains of
feathery green. A cloud of lake flies hung dark in the distance.
The soft lake haze redeemed landscape and waterscape now from
overclarity of outline the besetting blemish, as some might
think, of its mid-day. Isaka was really ill that morning. He
could hardly stir hand or foot. An askari came and looked at him,
and said something to his German officer. The latter came and
laid his hand not unkindly on his brow, found what the heat of
his body was, and gave him some drug out of their scanty store.
The great war with their fellow Christians was pinching them
sorely in the matter of medicines these sturdy patriots of
Central Europe. They were keeping their flag flying in a feverish
land where febrifuges meant much indeed. Isaka was let lie, and
he brooded over his dream the old dream that had come back so
intrusively last night into such alien surroundings. For he in
the province of the red-mounted rider had dreamed that He on the
White Horse came as an invader, the light of daybreak in His
looks, the faith of conquest in His eyes.

Now, a friend happened upon Isaka that morning, one who had been
reared upon