known him
very well, but what I had seen I had liked; and I suppose he was glad
to have one of Maggie's family with him, for he was still very low
about her loss. I was in pretty good spirits, for it meant new
experiences, and I had hopes of big game.

"You've never been to Deira? Well, there's no good trying to describe
it, for it's the only place in the world like itself. God made it and
left it to its own devices. The town is pretty enough, with its palms
and green headland, and little scrubby islands in the river's mouth.
It has the usual half-Arab, half-Portugee look-white green-shuttered
houses, flat roofs, sallow little men in duck, and every type of nigger
from the Somali to the Shangaan. There are some good buildings, and
Government House was the mansion of some old Portugee seigneur, and was
built when people in Africa were not in such a hurry as to-day. Inland
there's a rolling, forest country, beginning with decent trees and
ending in mimosa-thorn, when the land begins to rise to the stony hills
of the interior; and that poisonous yellow river rolls through it all,
with a denser native population along its banks than you will find
anywhere else north of the Zambesi. For about two months in the year
the climate is Paradise, and for the rest you live in a Turkish bath,
with every known kind of fever hanging about. We cleaned out the town
and improved the sanitation, so there were few epidemics, but there was
enough ordinary malaria to sicken a crocodile.

"The place was no special use to us. It had been annexed in spite of a
tremendous Radical outcry, and, upon my soul, it was one of the few
cases where the Radicals had something to say for themselves. All we
got by it was half a dozen of the nastiest problems an unfortunate
governor can have to face. Ten years before it had been a decaying
strip of coast, with a few trading firms in the town, and a small
export of ivory and timber. But some years before Tommy took it up
there had been a huge discovery of copper in the hills inland, a
railway had been built, and there were several biggish mining
settlements at the end of it. Deira itself was filled with offices of
European firms, it had got a Stock Exchange of its own, and it was
becoming the usual cosmopolitan playground. It had a knack, too, of
getting the very worst breed of adventurer. I know something of your
South African and Australian mining town, and with all their faults
they are ru