Knowing his secretive and tortuous nature, this sudden zeal for openness seemed almost unnatural.  He began by unrolling his own blanket, inside of which appeared a miscellaneous collection of articles.  I remember among them a spare pair of very dirty trousers, a battered tin cup, a wooden spoon such as Kaffirs use to eat their scoff with, a bottle full of some doubtful compound, sundry roots and other native medicines, an old pipe I had given him, and last but not least, a huge head of yellow tobacco in the leaf, of a kind that the Mazitu, like the Pongos, cultivate to some extent.

“What on earth do you want so much tobacco for, Hans?” I asked.

“For us three black people to smoke, Baas, or to take as snuff, or to chew.  Perhaps where we are going we may find little to eat, and then tobacco is a food on which one can live for days.  Also it brings sleep at nights.”

“Oh! that will do,” I said, fearing lest Hans, like a second Walter Raleigh, was about to deliver a long lecture upon the virtue of tobacco.

“There is no need for the yellow man to take this weed to our land,” interrupted Komba, “for there we have plenty.  Why does he cumber himself with the stuff?” and he stretched out his hand idly as though to take hold of and examine it closely.

At this moment, however, Mavovo called attention to his bundle which he had undone, whether on purpose or by accident, I do not know, and forgetting the tobacco, Komba turned to attend to him.  With a marvellous celerity Hans rolled up his blanket again.  In less than a minute the lashings were fast and it was hanging on his back.  Again suspicion took me, but an argument which had sprung up between Brother John and Komba about the former’s butterfly net, which Komba suspected of being a new kind of gun or at least a magical instrument of a dangerous sort, attracted my notice.  After this dispute, another arose over a common garden trowel that Stephen had thought fit to bring with him.  Komba asked what it was for.  Stephen replied through Brother John that it was to dig up flowers.

“Flowers!” said Komba.  “One of our gods is a flower.  Does the white lord wish to dig up our god?”

Of course this was exactly what Stephen did desire to do, but not unnaturally he kept the fact to himself.  The squabble grew so hot that finally I announced that if our little belongings were treated with so much suspicion, it might be better that we should give up the journey altogether.

“We have passed our word that we have no firearms,” I said in the most dignified manner that I could command, “and that should be enough for you, O Komba.”

Then Komba, after consultation with his companions, gave way.  Evidently he was anxious that we should visit Pongo-land.