I looked at him but did not answer, for to tell the truth I felt in no mood for argument.

Presently we arrived at our quarters, where the soldiers left us, to camp outside.  Full of his warlike plan, Stephen went at once to the hut in which the slavers’ guns had been stored with our own spare rifles and all the ammunition.  I saw him emerge looking very blank indeed and asked him what was the matter.

“Matter!” he answered in a voice that for once really was full of dismay.  “The matter is that those Mazitu have stolen all the guns and all the ammunition.  There’s not enough powder left to make a blue devil.”

“Well,” I replied, with the kind of joke one perpetrates under such circumstances, “we shall have plenty of blue devils without making any more.”

Truly ours was a dreadful situation.  Let the reader imagine it.  Within a little more than forty-eight hours we were to be shot to death with arrows if an erratic old gentleman who, for aught I knew might be dead, did not turn up at what was then one of the remotest and most inaccessible spots in Central Africa.  Moreover, our only hope that such a thing would happen, if hope it could be called, was the prophecy of a Kaffir witch-doctor.

To rely on this in any way was so absurd that I gave up thinking of it and set my mind to considering if there were any possible means of escape.  After hours of reflection I could find none.  Even Hans, with all his experience and nearly superhuman cunning, could suggest none.  We were unarmed and surrounded by thousands of savages, all of whom save perhaps Babemba, believed us to be slave-traders, a race that very properly they held in abhorrence, who had visited the country with the object of stealing their women and children.  The king, Bausi, a very prejudiced fellow, was dead against us.  Also by a piece of foolishness which I now bitterly regretted, as indeed I regretted the whole expedition, or at any rate entering on it in the absence of Brother John, we had made an implacable enemy of the head medicine-man, who to these folk was a sort of Archbishop of Canterbury.  Short of a miracle, there was no hope for us.  All that we could do was to say our prayers and prepare for the end.

Mavovo, it is true, remained cheerful.  His faith in his “Snake” was really touching.  He offered to go through that divination process again in our presence and demonstrate that there was no mistake.  I declined because I had no faith in divinations, and Stephen also declined, for another reason, namely that the result might prove to be different, which, he held, would be depressing.  The other Zulus oscillated between belief and scepticism, as do the unstable who set to work to study the evidences of Christianity.  But Sammy did not oscillate, he literally howled, and prepared the food which poured in upon us so badly that I had to turn on Hans to do the cooking, for however little appetite we might have, it was necessary that we should keep up our strength by eating.