“Know what it is?” Fred panted.

We did not know, and it was no use guessing.  It looked like burned lime, or else the secretions of about a billion birds; and there were no birds to speak of.

“Crocodile eggs!” said Fred.

We did not believe that.  Even Brown did not believe it.  There was no time to spare, but Brown out of curiosity agreed, so we took the absurd canoe and poled down to investigate.  As we came nearer the solid white broke up into a myriad dots, and Fred’s tale stood confirmed.

They were as long as two hens’ eggs laid end to end, or longer.  They lay in the sun in batches in every stage of incubation, and from almost every batch there were little crocodiles emerging, that made straight for the water.  What worse monster preyed on them to keep their numbers down, or what disease took care of their prolixity we could not guess.  Perhaps they ate one another, or just died of hunger.  The owner of the boat vowed there were no fish left in the river, and that the crocodiles did not eat hippo unless it were first dead.

We took another tent from among Fred’s loads, changed two of our porters for stronger ones, and went forward that evening; for it began to be obvious that the speed had been telling on the cattle.  We passed two more dead heifers within a few miles of the river bank, and there were other signs that for all our long sleep we were gaining on them.

Perhaps the Greeks thought they had shaken off pursuit.  Judging by the compass they were headed for the shore of Victoria Nyanza, where the grazing would be better, food for men would be purchaseable, and the number of villages closely spaced would make the task of night-herding vastly easier.  There isn’t a village in that part of Africa that is not proud to be a host to anybody’s cattle, if only because the ownership of so much living wealth casts glory on all who come in contact with it.

There was no means of telling whether or not we were over the German border.  The boundary line had not been surveyed yet, and on the map the part where we were was set down as “unexplored,” although that was scarcely accurate; the route was well enough known to Greeks and Arabs, and other had characters bent on smuggling or in some other way defeating the ends of justice.

We marched that night until midnight, slept until dawn, and were off again.  At noon we reached rising ground, and Kazimoto ran ahead of us to the summit.  We saw him standing at gaze for three or four minutes with one hand shading his eyes before he came scampering back, as excited as if his own fortune were in the balance.

“Hooko-chini!” he shouted.  “Hooko-chini—­mba-a-a-li sana!”—­(They’re down below there, very far away!)