on't see what we've scored by telling him," said Will to me.
"We've merely given him a peg to hang jokes on!"

But I knew that now Will had told the story he would not, for very
shame, withdraw from the venture until we should have demonstrated that
no Lady Saffren Waldon, nor Sultan of Zanzibar, nor Germans, nor Arabs
could make us afraid. And it seemed to me that was sufficient
accomplishment for one night.

The train's progress slowed and grew slower. The panting of the engine
came back to us in savage blasts. We were climbing by curves and
zigzags up the grim dark wall of mountains. And as we mounted inch by
inch, foot by foot, the air freshened and grew cooler--not really cool
yet by a very Jacob's ladder of degrees, but delectable by comparison.

There was something peacefully exhilarating in the thought of rising
from the red dead level of that awful plain, littered with the bones of
camels and the slaves whom men pinned into the yokes to perish or
survive in twos.* As we mounted foot by foot we fell asleep. Later,
as we mounted higher, we shivered under blankets. There is a spirit
and a spell of Africa that grip men even in sleep. The curt engine
blasts became in my dreams the panting of enormous beasts that fought.
A dream-continent waged war on itself, and bled. I saw the caravans
go, thousands long, the horsed and white-robed Arab in the lead--the
paid, fat, insolent askaris, flattering and flogging--slaves burdened
with ivory and other, naked, new ones, two in a yoke, shivering under
the askari's lash, the very last dogged by vultures and hyenas, lean as
they, ill-nourished on such poor picking.

-----------
* It was the cheerful Arab rule never to release one slave from the
yoke if the other failed on the journey, on the principle that then the
stronger would be more likely to care for, encourage, and drive the
weaker.
-----------

Then I saw elephants in herds five thousand strong that screamed and
stormed and crashed, flattening out villages in rage that man should
interfere with them--in fear of the ruthless few armed men with rifles
in their rear. Whole herds crashed pell-mell through artfully staged
undergrowth into thirty-foot-deep pits, where they lingered and died of
thirst, that Arabs (who sat smoking within hail until they died) might
have the ivory.

And all I saw in my dream was nothing to the things I really was to
see. None of the cruelty of man, none of the rage and fear of