Our troubles were not all over, for we passed through a country where buck were fairly plentiful, and that meant lions.  They did no damage, but they kept us awake; and one night near the first village we came to, where our porters all quartered themselves with the villagers for sake of the change from their crowded tents, the fires that we made went out, and five lions (we counted their foot-prints afterward) came and sniffed around the pegs of the tent in which Fred and I lay, we lying still and shamming dead.  To have lifted a rifle in the darkness and tried to shoot would have been suicide.

Then there were trees we passed among—­baobabs, whose youngest tendrils swung to and fro in the evening breeze like snakes head-downward.  And taking advantage of that natural provision, twenty-foot pythons swung among them, in coloring and marking aping the habit of the tree.  One of them knocked Fred’s helmet off as he marched beside me.  They are easy to kill.  He shot it, and it dropped like a stone, three hundred pounds or more, but the sweat ran down Fred’s face for half an hour afterward.

(Since then I have seen pythons kill their prey a score of times.  I never once saw one kill by crushing.  The end of their nose is as hard as iron, and they strike a terrific blow with that, so swift that the eye can not follow it.  Then, having killed by striking, they crawl around their prey and crush it into shape for swallowing.)

But the worst of the journey was the wayside villages—­dirty beyond belief, governed in a crude way by a headman whom the Germans honored with the title of sultani.  These wayside beggars (for they were no better)—­destitute paupers, taxed until their wits failed them in the effort to scrape together surplus enough out of which to pay—­were supplied with a mockery of a crown apiece, a thing of brass and imitation plush that they wore in the presence of strangers.  To add to the irony of that, the law of the land permitted any white man passing through to beat them, with as many as twenty-five lashes, if they failed to do his bidding.

On arriving at such a village, the first thing we did was to ask for milk.  If they had any they brought it, not daring to refuse for fear lest a German sergeant-major should be sent along to wreak vengeance later.  But it was always too dirty to drink.

That ceremony over, the headman retired and the village sick were brought for our inspection.  Gruesome sores, running ulcers, wounds and crippled limbs were stripped and exposed to our most reluctant gaze.  There was little we could do for them.  Our own supply of medicines and bandages was almost too small for our own needs to begin with.  By the time we passed three villages we scarcely had enough lint and liniment left to take care of my wound; but even that scant supply we cut in half for a particularly bad case.

“Don’t the Germans do anything for you?” we demanded, over and over again.