When at length we made a start on the following morning the sun was high over us.  Indeed, there was a great deal to do.  The guns and ammunition of the dead Arabs had to be collected; the ivory, of which they carried a good store, must be buried, for to take it with us was impossible, and the loads apportioned.[*] Also it was necessary to make litters for the wounded, and to stir up the slaves from their debauch, into the nature of which I made no further inquiries, was no easy task.  On mustering them I found that a good number had vanished during the night, where to I do not know.  Still a mob of well over two hundred people, a considerable portion of whom were women and children, remained, whose one idea seemed to be to accompany us wherever we might wander.  So with this miscellaneous following at length we started.

[*] To my sorrow we never saw this ivory again.—­A.Q.

To describe our adventures during the next month would be too long if not impossible, for to tell the truth, after the lapse of so many years, these have become somewhat entangled in my mind.  Our great difficulty was to feed such a multitude, for the store of rice and grain, upon which we were quite unable to keep a strict supervision, they soon devoured.  Fortunately the country through which we passed, at this time of the year (the end of the wet season) was full of game, of which, travelling as we did very slowly, we were able to shoot a great deal.  But this game killing, delightful as it may be to the sportsman, soon palled on us as a business.  To say nothing of the expenditure of ammunition, it meant incessant work.

Against this the Zulu hunters soon began to murmur, for, as Stephen and I could rarely leave the camp, the burden of it fell on them.  Ultimately I hit upon this scheme.  Picking out thirty or forty of the likeliest men among the slaves, I served out to each of them ammunition and one of the Arab guns, in the use of which we drilled them as best we could.  Then I told them that they must provide themselves and their companions with meat.  Of course accidents happened.  One man was accidentally shot and three others were killed by a cow elephant and a wounded buffalo.  But in the end they learned to handle their rifles sufficiently well to supply the camp.  Moreover, day by day little parties of the slaves disappeared, I presume to seek their own homes, so that when at last we entered the borders of the Mazitu country there were not more than fifty of them left, including seventeen of those whom we had taught to shoot.

Then it was that our real adventures began.

One evening, after three days’ march through some difficult bush in which lions carried off a slave woman, killed one of the donkeys and mauled another so badly that it had to be shot, we found ourselves upon the edge of a great grassy plateau that, according to my aneroid, was 1,640 feet above sea level.

“What place is this?” I asked of the two Mazitu guides, those same men whom we had borrowed from Hassan.