Coutlass exploded.

“Shouldn’t, eh?  Who the hell are you to tell me what I shouldn’t do?  Sell me a ticket, you black plunderer, d’you hear!  Look!  Listen!”

He snatched a piece of paper from the babu’s hand and turned to face the impatient crowd.

“This hell-cat—­” (the unhappy babu looked less like a hell-cat than any vision of the animal I ever imagined) “wants to make out that seventy-one times seven annas and three pice is forty-nine rupees, eleven annae!  Oh, you charlatan!  You mountebank!  You black-blooded robber!  You miscreant!  Cut your throat, I order you!”

The babu expostulated, stammered, quailed.  Coutlass drew in his breath for the gods of Greece alone knew what heights of fury next.  But interruption entered.

“There, that’s enough of you!  Get to the back of the line!”

The man who had promised us berths came abruptly through the barrier, and unlike the babu did not appear afraid of any one.  The Greek let out his gathered breath with a bark of fury, like a seal coming up to breathe.  Taking that for a symptom of opposition the newcomer, very cool in snow-white uniform and helmet, seized Coutlass by the neck and hustled him, arguing like a boiler under pressure, through the crowd.  The Greek was three inches taller, and six or eight inches bigger round the chest, but too astonished to fight back, and perhaps, too, aware of the neighborhood of old da Gama’s fort, where more than one Greek was pining for the grape and olive fields of Hellas.  With a final shove the railway official thrust him well out into the road.

“If you miss the train, serve you right!” he said.  “Babus are willing servants, to be treated gently!”

Then he saw us.

“You’re late!  Where’s your luggage?  These your porters?  All right—­put you on your honor.  Go on through.  Save time.  Have your stuff weighed, and settle the bill at Nairobi.  All of it, mind!  Babu, let these people through!”

Followed by Courtney, who seemed to have right of way wherever it suited him to wander, we filed through the gate, crossed the blazing hot platform, and boarded a compartment labeled “Reserved.”  The railway man nodded and left us, to hurry and help sell tickets.

It was an Indian type railway carriage be left us in, a contraption not ill-suited to Africa—­nor yet so comfortable as to diminish the sensation of travel toward new frontiers.

Each car was divided into two compartments, entirely separate and entered from opposite ends; facing ours was the rear end of a second-class car, into which we could look if the doors were open and we lay feet-foremost on the berths.  The berths were arranged lengthwise, two each side, and one above the other.

It was what they called a mixed train, mixed that is of freight and passengers—­third-class in front, second next, then first, and a dozen little iron freight cars of two kinds in front.  In those days there were neither tunnels nor bridges on that railway, and there was a single seat on the roof at each end of first- and second-class compartments reached by a ladder, for any passenger enamored of the view.  Even the third-class compartments (and they were otherwise as deliberately bare and comfortless as wood and iron could make them) had lattice-work shades over the upper half of the windows.