CHAPTER III.

THE MISSION STATION

We made the remains of our rope fast to the other canoe, and sat

waiting for the dawn and congratulating ourselves upon our merciful

escape, which really seemed to result more from the special favour of

Providence than from our own care or prowess. At last it came, and I

have not often been more grateful to see the light, though so far as my

canoe was concerned it revealed a ghastly sight. There in the bottom of

the little boat lay the unfortunate Askari, the sime, or sword, in his

bosom, and the severed hand gripping the handle. I could not bear the

sight, so hauling up the stone which had served as an anchor to the

other canoe, we made it fast to the murdered man and dropped him

overboard, and down he went to the bottom, leaving nothing but a train

of bubbles behind him. Alas! when our time comes, most of us like him

leave nothing but bubbles behind, to show that we have been, and the

bubbles soon burst. The hand of his murderer we threw into the stream,

where it slowly sank. The sword, of which the handle was ivory, inlaid

with gold (evidently Arab work), I kept and used as a hunting-knife,

and very useful it proved.

Then, a man having been transferred to my canoe, we once more started

on in very low spirits and not feeling at all comfortable as to the

future, but fondly hoping to arrive at the “Highlands” station by

night. To make matters worse, within an hour of sunrise it came on to

rain in torrents, wetting us to the skin, and even necessitating the

occasional baling of the canoes, and as the rain beat down the wind we

could not use the sails, and had to get along as best as we could with

our paddles.

At eleven o’clock we halted on an open piece of ground on the left bank

of the river, and, the rain abating a little, managed to make a fire

and catch and broil some fish. We did not dare to wander about to

search for game. At two o’clock we got off again, taking a supply of

broiled fish with us, and shortly afterwards the rain came on harder

than ever. Also the river began to get exceedingly difficult to

navigate on account of the numerous rocks, reaches of shallow water,

and the increased force of the current; so that it soon became clear to

us that we should not reach the Rev. Mackenzie’s hospitable roof that

night—a prospect that did not tend to enliven us. Toil as we would, we

could not make more than an average of a mile an hour, and at five

o’clock in the afternoon (by which time we were all utterly worn out)

we reckoned that we were still quite ten miles below the station. This

being so, we set to work to make the best arrangements we could for the

night. After our recent experience, we simply did not dare to land,

more especially as the banks of the Tana were clothed with dense bush

that would have given cover to five thousand Masai, and at first I

thought that we were going to have another night of it in the canoes.

Fortunately, however, we espied a little rocky islet, not more than

fifteen miles or so square, situated nearly in the middle of the river.

For this we paddled, and, making fast the canoes, landed and made

ourselves as comfortable as circumstances would permit, which was very

uncomfortable indeed. As for the weather, it continued to be simply

vile, the rain coming down in sheets till we were chilled to the

marrow, and utterly preventing us from lighting a fire. There was,

however, one consoling circumstance about this rain; our Askari

declared that nothing would induce the Masai to make an attack in it,

as they intensely disliked moving about in the wet, perhaps, as Good

suggested, because they hate the idea of washing. We ate some insipid

and sodden cold fish—that is, with the exception of Umslopogaas, who,

like most Zulus, cannot bear fish—and took a pull of brandy, of which

we fortunately had a few bottles left, and then began what, with one

exception—when we same three white men nearly perished of cold on the

snow of Sheba’s Breast in the course of our journey to Kukuanaland—was,

I think, the most trying night I ever experienced. It seemed absolutely

endless, and once or twice I feared that two of the Askari would have

died of the wet, cold, and exposure. Indeed, had it not been for timely

doses of brandy I am sure that they would have died, for no African

people can stand much exposure, which first paralyses and then kills

them. I could see that even that iron old warrior Umslopogaas felt it

keenly; though, in strange contrast to the Wakwafis, who groaned and

bemoaned their fate unceasingly, he never uttered a single complaint.

To make matters worse, about one in the morning we again heard the

owl’s ominous hooting, and had at once to prepare ourselves for another

attack; though, if it had been attempted, I do not think that we could

have offered a very effective resistance. But either the owl was a real

one this time, or else the Masai were themselves too miserable to think

of offensive operations, which, indeed, they rarely, if ever, undertake

in bush veldt. At any rate, we saw nothing of them.

At last the dawn came gliding across the water, wrapped in wreaths of

ghostly mist, and, with the daylight, the rain ceased; and then, out

came the glorious sun, sucking up the mists and warming the chill air.

Benumbed, and utterly exhausted, we dragged ourselves to our feet, and

went and stood in the bright rays, and were thankful for them. I can

quite understand how it is that primitive people become sun

worshippers, especially if their conditions of life render them liable

to exposure.

In half an hour more we were once again making fair progress with the

help of a good wind. Our spirits had returned with the sunshine, and we

were ready to laugh at difficulties and dangers that had been almost

crushing on the previous day.

And so we went on cheerily till about eleven o’clock. Just as we were

thinking of halting as usual, to rest and try to shoot something to

eat, a sudden bend in the river brought us in sight of a

substantial-looking European house with a veranda round it, splendidly

situated upon a hill, and surrounded by a high stone wall with a ditch

on the outer side. Right against and overshadowing the house was an

enormous pine, the top of which we had seen through a glass for the

last two days, but of course without knowing that it marked the site of

the mission station. I was the first to see the house, and could not

restrain myself from giving a hearty cheer, in which the others,

including the natives, joined lustily. There was no thought of halting

now. On we laboured, for, unfortunately, though the house seemed quite

near, it was still a long way off by river, until at last, by one

o’clock, we found ourselves at the bottom of the slope on which the

building stood. Running the canoes to the bank, we disembarked, and

were just hauling them up on to the shore, when we perceived three

figures, dressed in ordinary English-looking clothes, hurrying down

through a grove of trees to meet us.

“A gentleman, a lady, and a little girl,” ejaculated Good, after

surveying the trio through his eyeglass, “walking in a civilized

fashion, through a civilized garden, to meet us in this place. Hang me,

if this isn’t the most curious thing we have seen yet!”

Good was right: it certainly did seem odd and out of place—more like a

scene out of a dream or an Italian opera than a real tangible fact; and

the sense of unreality was not lessened when we heard ourselves

addressed in good broad Scotch, which, however, I cannot reproduce.

“How do you do, sirs,” said Mr Mackenzie, a grey-haired, angular man,

with a kindly face and red cheeks; “I hope I see you very well. My

natives told me an hour ago they spied two canoes with white men in

them coming up the river; so we have just come down to meet you.”

“And it is very glad that we are to see a white face again, let me tell

you,” put in the lady—a charming and refined-looking person.

We took off our hats in acknowledgment, and proceeded to introduce

ourselves.

“And now,” said Mr Mackenzie, “you must all be hungry and weary; so

come on, gentlemen, come on, and right glad we are to see you. The last

white who visited us was Alphonse—you will see Alphonse presently—and

that was a year ago.”

Meanwhile we had been walking up the slope of the hill, the lower

portion of which was fenced off, sometimes with quince fences and

sometimes with rough stone walls, into Kaffir gardens, just now full of

crops of mealies, pumpkins, potatoes, etc. In the corners of these

gardens were groups of neat mushroom-shaped huts, occupied by Mr

Mackenzie’s mission natives, whose women and children came pouring out

to meet us as we walked. Through the centre of the gardens ran the

roadway up which we were walking. It was bordered on each side by a

line of orange trees, which, although they had only been planted ten

years, had in the lovely climate of the uplands below Mt Kenia, the

base of which is about 5,000 feet above the coastline level, already

grown to imposing proportions, and were positively laden with golden

fruit. After a stiffish climb of a quarter of a mile or so—for the

hillside was steep—we came to a splendid quince fence, also covered

with fruit, which enclosed, Mr Mackenzie told us, a space of about four

acres of ground that contained his private garden, house, church, and

outbuildings, and, indeed, the whole hilltop. And what a garden it was!

I have always loved a good garden, and I could have thrown up my hands

for joy when I saw Mr Mackenzie’s. First there were rows upon rows of

standard European fruit-trees, all grafted; for on top of this hill the

climate was so temperate that nearly all the English vegetables, trees,

and flowers flourished luxuriantly, even including several varieties of

the apple, which, generally, runs to wood in a warm climate and

obstinately refuses to fruit. Then there were strawberries and tomatoes

(such tomatoes!), and melons and cucumbers, and, indeed, every sort of

vegetable and fruit.

“Well, you have something like a garden!” I said, overpowered with

admiration not untouched by envy.

“Yes,” answered the missionary, “it is a very good garden, and has well

repaid my labour; but it is the climate that I have to thank. If you

stick a peach-stone into the ground it will bear fruit the fourth year,

and a rose-cutting will bloom in a year. It is a lovely clime.”

Just then we came to a ditch about ten feet wide, and full of water, on

the other side of which was a loopholed stone wall eight feet high, and

with sharp flints plentifully set in mortar on the coping.

“There,” said Mr Mackenzie, pointing to the ditch and wall, “this is my

_magnum opus;_ at least, this and the church, which is the other side

of the house. It took me and twenty natives two years to dig the ditch

and build the wall, but I never felt safe till it was done; and now I

can defy all the savages in Africa, for the spring that fills the ditch

is inside the wall, and bubbles out at the top of the hill winter and

summer alike, and I always keep a store of four months’ provision in

the house.”

Crossing over a plank and through a very narrow opening in the wall, we

entered into what Mrs Mackenzie called _her_ domain—namely, the flower

garden, the beauty of which is really beyond my power to describe. I do

not think I ever saw such roses, gardenias, or camellias (all reared

from seeds or cuttings sent from England); and there was also a patch

given up to a collection of bulbous roots mostly collected by Miss

Flossie, Mr Mackenzie’s little daughter, from the surrounding country,

some of which were surpassingly beautiful. In the middle of this

garden, and exactly opposite the veranda, a beautiful fountain of clear

water bubbled up from the ground, and fell into a stone-work basin

which had been carefully built to receive it, whence the overflow found

its way by means of a drain to the moat round the outer wall, this moat

in its turn serving as a reservoir, whence an unfailing supply of water

was available to irrigate all the gardens below. The house itself, a

massively built single-storied building, was roofed with slabs of

stone, and had a handsome veranda in front. It was built on three sides

of a square, the fourth side being taken up by the kitchens, which

stood separate from the house—a very good plan in a hot country. In the

centre of this square thus formed was, perhaps, the most remarkable

object that we had yet seen in this charming place, and that was a

single tree of the conifer tribe, varieties of which grow freely on the

highlands of this part of Africa. This splendid tree, which Mr

Mackenzie informed us was a landmark for fifty miles round, and which

we had ourselves seen for the last forty miles of our journey, must

have been nearly three hundred feet in height, the trunk measuring

about sixteen feet in diameter at a yard from the ground. For some

seventy feet it rose a beautiful tapering brown pillar without a single

branch, but at that height splendid dark green boughs, which, looked at

from below, had the appearance of gigantic fern-leaves, sprang out

horizontally from the trunk, projecting right over the house and

flower-garden, to both of which they furnished a grateful proportion of

shade, without—being so high up—offering any impediment to the passage

of light and air.

“What a beautiful tree!” exclaimed Sir Henry.

“Yes, you are right; it is a beautiful tree. There is not another like

it in all the country round, that I know of,” answered Mr Mackenzie. “I

call it my watch tower. As you see, I have a rope ladder fixed to the

lowest bough; and if I want to see anything that is going on within

fifteen miles or so, all I have to do is to run up it with a spyglass.

But you must be hungry, and I am sure the dinner is cooked. Come in, my

friends; it is but a rough place, but well enough for these savage

parts; and I can tell you what, we have got—a French cook.” And he led

the way on to the veranda.

As I was following him, and wondering what on earth he could mean by

this, there suddenly appeared, through the door that opened on to the

veranda from the house, a dapper little man, dressed in a neat blue

cotton suit, with shoes made of tanned hide, and remarkable for a

bustling air and most enormous black mustachios, shaped into an upward

curve, and coming to a point for all the world like a pair of

buffalo-horns.

“Madame bids me for to say that dinnar is sarved. Messieurs, my

compliments;” then suddenly perceiving Umslopogaas, who was loitering

along after us and playing with his battleaxe, he threw up his hands in

astonishment. “_Ah, mais quel homme!_” he ejaculated in French, “_quel

sauvage affreux!_ Take but note of his huge choppare and the great pit

in his head.”

“Ay,” said Mr Mackenzie; “what are you talking about, Alphonse?”

“Talking about!” replied the little Frenchman, his eyes still fixed

upon Umslopogaas, whose general appearance seemed to fascinate him;

“why I talk of him”—and he rudely pointed—“of _ce monsieur noir_.”

At this everybody began to laugh, and Umslopogaas, perceiving that he

was the object of remark, frowned ferociously, for he had a most lordly

dislike of anything like a personal liberty.

“_Parbleu!_” said Alphonse, “he is angered—he makes the grimace. I like

not his air. I vanish.” And he did with considerable rapidity.

Mr Mackenzie joined heartily in the shout of laughter which we indulged

in. “He is a queer character—Alphonse,” he said. “By and by I will tell

you his history; in the meanwhile let us try his cooking.”

“Might I ask,” said Sir Henry, after we had eaten a most excellent

dinner, “how you came to have a French cook in these wilds?”

“Oh,” answered Mrs Mackenzie, “he arrived here of his own accord about

a year ago, and asked to be taken into our service. He had got into

some trouble in France, and fled to Zanzibar, where he found an

application had been made by the French Government for his extradition.

Whereupon he rushed off up-country, and fell in, when nearly starved,

with our caravan of men, who were bringing us our annual supply of

goods, and was brought on here. You should get him to tell you the

story.”

When dinner was over we lit our pipes, and Sir Henry proceeded to give

our host a description of our journey up here, over which he looked

very grave.

“It is evident to me,” he said, “that those rascally Masai are

following you, and I am very thankful that you have reached this house

in safety. I do not think that they will dare to attack you here. It is

unfortunate, though, that nearly all my men have gone down to the coast

with ivory and goods. There are two hundred of them in the caravan, and

the consequence is that I have not more than twenty men available for

defensive purposes in case they should attack us. But, still, I will

just give a few orders;” and, calling a black man who was loitering

about outside in the garden, he went to the window, and addressed him

in a Swahili dialect. The man listened, and then saluted and departed.

“I am sure I devoutly hope that we shall bring no such calamity upon

you,” said I, anxiously, when he had taken his seat again. “Rather than

bring those bloodthirsty villains about your ears, we will move on and

take our chance.”

“You will do nothing of the sort. If the Masai come, they come, and

there is an end on it; and I think we can give them a pretty warm

greeting. I would not show any man the door for all the Masai in the

world.”

“That reminds me,” I said, “the Consul at Lamu told me that he had had

a letter from you, in which you said that a man had arrived here who

reported that he had come across a white people in the interior. Do you

think that there was any truth in his story? I ask, because I have once

or twice in my life heard rumours from natives who have come down from

the far north of the existence of such a race.”

Mr Mackenzie, by way of answer, went out of the room and returned,

bringing with him a most curious sword. It was long, and all the blade,

which was very thick and heavy, was to within a quarter of an inch of

the cutting edge worked into an ornamental pattern exactly as we work

soft wood with a fret-saw, the steel, however, being invariably pierced

in such a way as not to interfere with the strength of the sword. This

in itself was sufficiently curious, but what was still more so was that

all the edges of the hollow spaces cut through the substance of the

blade were most beautifully inlaid with gold, which was in some way

that I cannot understand welded on to the steel.[5]

[5] Since I saw the above I have examined hundreds of these swords,

but have never been able to discover how the gold plates were inlaid

in the fretwork. The armourers who make them in Zu-vendis bind

themselves by oath not to reveal the secret.—A. Q.

“There,” said Mr Mackenzie, “did you ever see a sword like that?”

We all examined it and shook our heads.

“Well, I have got it to show you, because this is what the man who said

he had seen the white people brought with him, and because it does more

or less give an air of truth to what I should otherwise have set down

as a lie. Look here; I will tell you all that I know about the matter,

which is not much. One afternoon, just before sunset, I was sitting on

the veranda, when a poor, miserable, starved-looking man came limping

up and squatted down before me. I asked him where he came from and what

he wanted, and thereon he plunged into a long rambling narrative about

how he belonged to a tribe far in the north, and how his tribe was

destroyed by another tribe, and he with a few other survivors driven

still further north past a lake named Laga. Thence, it appears, he made

his way to another lake that lay up in the mountains, ‘a lake without a

bottom’ he called it, and here his wife and brother died of an

infectious sickness—probably smallpox—whereon the people drove him out

of their villages into the wilderness, where he wandered miserably over

mountains for ten days, after which he got into dense thorn forest, and

was one day found there by some _white men_ who were hunting, and who

took him to a place where all the people were white and lived in stone

houses. Here he remained a week shut up in a house, till one night a

man with a white beard, whom he understood to be a ‘medicine-man’, came

and inspected him, after which he was led off and taken through the

thorn forest to the confines of the wilderness, and given food and this

sword (at least so he said), and turned loose.”

“Well,” said Sir Henry, who had been listening with breathless

interest, “and what did he do then?”

“Oh! he seems, according to his account, to have gone through

sufferings and hardships innumerable, and to have lived for weeks on

roots and berries, and such things as he could catch and kill. But

somehow he did live, and at last by slow degrees made his way south and

reached this place. What the details of his journey were I never

learnt, for I told him to return on the morrow, bidding one of my

headmen look after him for the night. The headman took him away, but

the poor man had the itch so badly that the headman’s wife would not

have him in the hut for fear of catching it, so he was given a blanket

and told to sleep outside. As it happened, we had a lion hanging about

here just then, and most unhappily he winded this unfortunate wanderer,

and, springing on him, bit his head almost off without the people in

the hut knowing anything about it, and there was an end of him and his

story about the white people; and whether or no there is any truth in

it is more than I can tell you. What do you think, Mr Quatermain?”

I shook my head, and answered, “I don’t know. There are so many queer

things hidden away in the heart of this great continent that I should

be sorry to assert that there was no truth in it. Anyhow, we mean to

try and find out. We intend to journey to Lekakisera, and thence, if we

live to get so far, to this Lake Laga; and, if there are any white

people beyond, we will do our best to find them.”

“You are very venturesome people,” said Mr Mackenzie, with a smile, and

the subject dropped.