olly old Commissioner has gone----"

"You're not going away again, are you?" she asked, turning to Sanders.
"Why, you have only just come back from the interior."

There was genuine disappointment in her eyes, and Sanders experienced a
strange thrill the like of which he had never known before.

"Yes," he said with a nod. "There is a palaver of sorts in the Morjaba
country--the most curious palaver I have ever been called upon to hold."

And indeed he spoke the truth.

Beyond the frontiers of the Akasava, and separated from all the other
Territories by a curious bush belt which ran almost in a straight line
for seventy miles, were the people of Morjaba. They were a folk isolated
from territorial life, and Sanders saw them once every year and no more
frequently, for they were difficult to come by, regular payers of taxes
and law-abiding, having quarrels with none. The bush (reputedly the
abode of ghosts) was, save at one point, impenetrable. Nature had
plaited a natural wall on one side, and had given the tribe the
protection of high mountains to the north and a broad swamp to the
west.

The fierce storms of passion and hate which burst upon the river at
intervals and sent thousands of spears to a blooding, were scarcely
echoed in this sanctuary-land. The marauders of the Great King's country
to the north never fetched across the smooth moraine of the mountains,
and the evil people of The-Land-beyond-the-Swamp were held back by the
treacherous bogland wherein, _cala-cala_, a whole army had been
swallowed up.

Thus protected, the Morjabian folk grew fat and rich. The land was a
veritable treasure of Nature, and it is a fact that in the dialect they
speak, there is no word which means "hunger."[5]

[Footnote 5: It is as curious a fact that amongst the majority of
cannibal people there is no equivalent for "thank you."--E. W.]

Yet the people of the Morjaba were not without their crises.

S'kobi, the stout chief, held a great court which was attended by ten
thousand people, for at that court was to be concluded for ever the feud
between the M'gimi and the M'joro--a feud which went back for the
greater part of fifty years.

The M'gimi were the traditional warrior tribe, the bearers of arms, and,
as their name ("The High Lookers") implied, the proudest and most
exclusive of the people. For every man was the descendant of a chief,
and it was "easier for fish to walk," as the saying goes, than for a
man of the M'jo