The next morning we imagined Brown was sober and sorry enough to hold his tongue, so, without going into details with him, we agreed to go with him “some of the way,” and Fred spent the whole of that morning in the bazaar buying loads of food and general supplies.  Will and I engaged porters, and with Kazimoto’s aid as interpreter, had fifty ready to march that afternoon.

The whole trick of starting on a journey is to start.  If you only make a mile or two the first day you have at least done better than stand still; loads have been apportioned and porters broken in to some extent; you have broken the spell of inertia, and hereafter there is less likely to be trouble.  We made up our minds to get away that afternoon, and I was sent back to the hotel to find Brown, who had gone for his belongings.

If Brown had stayed sober all might have been well, but his headache and feeling of unworthiness had been too much for him and I found him with a straw in the neck of a bottle of whisky alternately laying down law to Georges Coutlass and drinking himself into a state of temporary bliss.

“You Greeks dunno nothin’!” he asserted as I came in.  “You never did know nothin’, an’ you’re never goin’ to know nothin’!  ’Cause why?  ‘I’ll tell you.  Simply because I am goin’ to tell!  I’m mum, I am!  When s’mother gents an’ me ’ave business, that’s our business—­see!  None o’ your business—­’ss our business, an’ I’m not goin’ to tell you Greeks nothin’ about where we’re off to, nor why, nor when.  An’ you put that in your pipe an’ smoke it!”

I sat in the dining-room for a while, hoping that the Greek would go away; but as Brown was fast drinking himself into a condition when he could not have been moved except on stretcher, and was momentarily edging closer to an admission of all he knew or guessed about our intention, I took the bull by the horns at last—­snatched away his whisky bottle, and walked off with it.

He came after me swearing like a trooper, and his own porters, who had been waiting for more than an hour beside his loads, trailed along after him.  Once in our camp we made a hammock for him out of a blanket tied to a pole, and made him over to two porters with the promise that they would get no supper if they lost him.  Then we started—­uphill, toward the red Kikuyu heights, where settlers were already trying to grow potatoes for which there was no market, and onions that would only run to seed.

To our left rear and right front were the highest mountain ranges in Africa.  Before us was the pass through which the railway threaded over the wide high table-land before dipping downward to Victoria Nyanza.  On our left front was all Kikuyu country, and after that Lumbwa, and native reserves, and forest, and swamp, and desert, and the German boundary.

We made a long march of it that first day, and camped after dark within two miles of Kikuyu station.  Most of the scrub thereabouts was castor oil plant, that makes very poor fuel; yet there were lions in plenty that roared and scouted around us even before the tents were pitched.