The night work was the hardest., because, although we were quite sure about direction, even in the dark, it was another matter to feel our way and carry unaccustomed loads.  By day we decided what to take and what to leave behind, and we cut down what to take with us to the irreducible, dangerous minimum.  Then we broke that up into thirty- or forty-pound packages, so that when we all three made the trip to the dhow the most we took at one time was about a hundred pounds’ weight.  In the condition I was in I could take not more than one trip to the others’ two; after the first it was agreed that I would better stay behind and keep an eye on the askari.  The minute he showed symptoms of becoming inquisitive I was to invent some way of keeping his attention; so all unsuspected by him I lay in the sand by the roadside within three yards of him, while the ants crawled over me and he dozed leaning on his rifle.  Once a long snake crawled over my wrist and my very marrow curdled with fear and loathing; but except for mosquitoes, who were legion and sucked their fill, there was no other contretemps.  I don’t know what I would have done if the askari had taken alarm and set off to investigate.  I trusted to intuition should that happen.

The work of arranging the stuff in the dhow was the most difficult of all, because we dared not light a lantern, yet we also dared not stow things carelessly for fear of confusion when the hour of action came.  The space was ridiculously small for ourselves and all those men, and every inch had to be economized.  In addition to that the dhow had to be worked backward off the mud far enough to be shoved off easily, and then made fast by a rope to the bushes in such way as not to be noticeable.  Most of the ropes turned out to be rather rotten, and we could only guess at the condition of the sails; the feel of them in the dark gave us small assurance.  But fortunately we had a couple of hundred feet of good half-inch manila in camp with us, and that Fred and Will took out and stowed in the hold the night following.

We bought such things at the D.O.A.G. as we could without arousing suspicion, as, for instance, a quantity of German dried pea-soup—­not that the porters would take to it kindly, but it would go a long way among them at a pinch.  Live stock we did not dare buy, for fear of the noise it would make; but we laid in some eggs and bananas.  Most of the thirty-pound loads were rice.

It troubled us sorely to leave our good tents, beds, and equipment behind, yet all we could take was the blankets and one gladstone bag packed with clothes for us all.  Kettles and pots and pans were a noisy nuisance, yet we had to have them, and blankets for all those porters, who would escape from jail practically naked, were an essential; but fortunately we had a sixty-pound bale of trade-blankets among our loads.