Hillyard looked at his shikari.  But the shikari neither spoke nor altered the regularity of his face.  Hillyard put no question in consequence.  The Arab was ten days’ journey from the nearest village and, even so, his back was turned towards it.  He was moving from solitude into solitude still more silent and remote.  It was impossible.  Hillyard’s eyes were playing him false.

He shut them for an instant and opened them again, thinking that the vision would have gone.  But there was the Arab still nearer to them and moving with a swift agility.  A ray of sunlight struck through the branches of a tree and burned suddenly like a dancing flame on something the man carried—­a carbine with a brass hammer.  And the next moment a sound proved beyond all doubt to Hillyard that his eyes did not deceive him.  For he heard the slapping of the Arab’s loose slippers upon the hard-caked earth.

Oh yes, the man was real enough.  For the shikari suddenly swerved from the head of the file towards the stranger and stopped.  The two men talked together and meanwhile Hillyard and the rest of his party halted.  Hillyard lit his pipe.

“Who is it, Hamet?” he cried, and the shikari turned with his companion and came back.

“It is the postman,” he said as though the delivery of letters along the Dinder River were the most commonplace of events.

“The postman!” cried Hillyard.  “What in the world do you mean?”

“Yes,” Hamet explained.  “He carries letters between Abyssinia and Senga on the Blue Nile.  He is now on his way back to Abyssinia.”

“But how long does it take him?” Hillyard asked in amazement.

“He goes and returns once a year.  The journey takes him four months each way unless he meets with a party shooting.  Then it takes longer for he goes with the party to get meat.”

Hillyard stared at the Arab in amazement.  He was a lean slip of a man, almost as black as a negro, with his hair running back above the temples, and legs like walking-sticks.  He stood wreathed in smiles and nodding confirmation of Hamet’s words.  But to Hillyard, with the emotions of the dark hour just past still shivering about him, he seemed something out of nature.  Hillyard leaned from his donkey and took the carbine from the postman’s hand.  It was an ancient thing of Spanish manufacture, heavy as a pig of lead.

“But this can’t be of any use,” he cried.  “Is the man never attacked?”

Hamet talked with the Arab in a dialect Hillyard did not understand at all; and interpreted the conversation.

“No.  He has only once fired his rifle.  One night—­oh, a long way farther to the south—­he waked up to see an elephant fighting his little donkey in the moonlight and he fired his rifle and the elephant ran away.  You must know that all these little Korans he carries on his arms and round his neck have been specially blessed by a most holy man.”

The postman’s shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck were circled about by chaplets on which little wooden Korans were strung.  He fingered them and counted them, smiling like a woman displaying her jewels to her less fortunate friends.