So at last we started.  We three white men and our servants seated ourselves in the stern of the canoe on grass cushions that had been provided.  Komba went to the bows and his people, taking the broad paddles, rowed and pushed the boat along the water-way made by the hippopotami through the tall and matted reeds, from which ducks and other fowl rose in multitudes with a sound like thunder.  A quarter of an hour or so of paddling through these weed-encumbered shallows brought us to the deep and open lake.  Here, on the edge of the reeds a tall pole that served as a mast was shipped, and a square sail, made of closely-woven mats, run up.  It filled with the morning off-land breeze and presently we were bowling along at a rate of quite eight miles the hour.  The shore grew dim behind us, but for a long while above the clinging mists I could see the flag that we had planted on the mound.  By degrees it dwindled till it became a mere speck and vanished.  As it grew smaller my spirits sank, and when it was quite gone, I felt very low indeed.

Another of your fool’s errands, Allan my boy, I said to myself.  I wonder how many more you are destined to survive.

The others, too, did not seem in the best of spirits.  Brother John stared at the horizon, his lips moving as though he were engaged in prayer, and even Stephen was temporarily depressed.  Jerry had fallen asleep, as a native generally does when it is warm and he has nothing to do.  Mavovo looked very thoughtful.  I wondered whether he had been consulting his Snake again, but did not ask him.  Since the episode of our escape from execution by bow and arrow I had grown somewhat afraid of that unholy reptile.  Next time it might foretell our immediate doom, and if it did I knew that I should believe.

As for Hans, he looked much disturbed, and was engaged in wildly hunting for something in the flap pockets of an antique corduroy waistcoat which, from its general appearance, must, I imagine, years ago have adorned the person of a British game-keeper.

“Three,” I heard him mutter.  “By my great grandfather’s spirit! only three left.”

“Three what?” I asked in Dutch.

“Three charms, Baas, and there ought to have been quite twenty-four.  The rest have fallen out through a hole that the devil himself made in this rotten stuff.  Now we shall not die of hunger, and we shall not be shot, and we shall not be drowned, at least none of those things will happen to me.  But there are twenty-one other things that may finish us, as I have lost the charms to ward them off.  Thus——­”

“Oh! stop your rubbish,” I said, and fell again into the depths of my uncomfortable reflections.  After this I, too, went to sleep.  When I woke it was past midday and the wind was falling.  However, it held while we ate some food we had brought with us, after which it died away altogether, and the Pongo people took to their paddles.  At my suggestion we offered to help them, for it occurred to me that