wild herbs.  Through the drizzle of the autumn rain they heard the wild thunderbolt tear the trees from earthly moorings.  In their eyes was the livid lightning that searched in spasms of anger for its prey, while there swept over the brown, aching veld the flood which filled the spruits, which made the rivers seas, and ploughed fresh channels through the soil.  The luxury of this room, with its shining mahogany tables, its tapestried walls, its rare fireplace and massive overmantel brought from Italy, its exquisite stained-glass windows, was only part of a play they were acting; it was not their real life.

And now there was not one of them that saw anything incongruous in the whip of rhinoceros-hide lying on the table, or clinched in Barry Whalen’s hand.  On the contrary, it gave them a sense of supreme naturalness.  They had lived in a land where the sjambok was the symbol of progress.  It represented the forward movement of civilization in the wilderness.  It was the vierkleur of the pioneer, without which the long train of capewagons, with the oxen in longer coils of effort, would never have advanced; without which the Kaffir and the Hottentot would have sacrificed every act of civilization.  It prevented crime, it punished crime, it took the place of the bowie-knife and the derringer of that other civilization beyond the Mississippi; it was the lock to the door in the wild places, the open sesame to the territories where native chiefs ruled communal tribes by playing tyrant to the commune.  It was the rod of Aaron staying the plague of barbarism.  It was the sceptre of the veldt.  It drew blood, it ate human flesh, it secured order where there was no law, and it did the work of prison and penitentiary.  It was the symbol of authority in the wilderness.

It was race.

Stafford was the only man present who saw anything incongruous in the scene, and yet his travels in the East his year in Persia, Tibet and Afghanistan, had made him understand things not revealed to the wise and prudent of European domains.  With Krool before them, who was of the veld and the karoo, whose natural habitat was but a cross between a krall and the stoep of a dopper’s home, these men were instantly transported to the land where their hearts were in spite of all, though the flesh-pots of the West End of London had turned them into by-paths for a while.  The skin had been scratched by Krool’s insolence and the knowledge of his treachery, and the Tartar showed—­the sjambok his scimitar.

In spite of himself, Stafford was affected by it all.  He understood.  This was not London; the scene had shifted to Potchefstroom or Middleburg, and Krool was transformed too.  The sjambok had, like a wizard’s wand, as it were, lifted him away from England to spaces where he watched from the grey rock of a kopje for the glint of an assegai or the red of a Rooinek’s tunic:  and he had done both in his day.

“We’ve got you at last, Krool,” said Wallstein.  “We have been some time at it, but it’s a long lane that has no turning, and we have you—­”