“You look it!” Brown interrupted.  “Well, what’s the odds?  You’ll never find it, and anyhow, everybody knows it’s Tippoo Tib’s ivory.  I mean to have a crack at spotting it myself, soon as I get my farm fenced an’ one or two other matters attended to.  Gov’ment offers ten per cent. to whoever leads ’em to it, but they can’t believe any one’s as soft as that surely!  They’ll be lucky if they get ten per cent. of it themselves!  Man alive, but they say there’s a whale of a hoard of it!  Hundreds o’ tons of ivory, all waiting to be found, and fossicked out, an’ took!  Say—­if I was some o’ those Greeks for instance, tell you what I’d do:  I’d off to Zanzibar, an’ kidnap Tippoo Tib.  The old card’s still living.  I’d apply a red-hot poker to his silver-side an’ the under-parts o’ his tripe-casings.  He’d tell me where the stuff is quicker’n winking!  Supposin’ I was a Greek without morals or no compunctions or nothin’, that’s what I’d do!  I don’t hold with allowin’ any man to play dog in the manger with all that plunder!”

“Have you a notion where the stuff might be?” Fred wondered guilelessly.

“Ah!  That ’ud be tellin’!”

We had crossed the water that divides Mombasa from the mainland.  Behind us lay the prettiest and safest harbor on all that thousand-league-long coast; before us was the narrow territory that still paid revenue and owed nominal allegiance to the Sultan of Zanzibar, although really like the rest of those parts under British rule.  We were bowling along beside plantations of cocoanut, peanut, plantain and pineapple, with here and there a thicket of strange trees to show what the aboriginal jungle had once looked like.  When we stopped at wayside stations the heat increased insufferably, until we entered the great red desert that divides the coast-land from the hills, and after that all seemed death and dust, and haziness, and hell.

At first we passed occasional baobabs, with trunks fifteen or twenty feet thick and offshoots covering a quarter of an acre.  Then the trees thinned out to the sparse and shriveled all-but-dead things that struggle for existence on the border-lines between man’s land and desolation.  At last we drew down the smoked panes over the window to escape the glare and sight of the depressing desolation.

The sun beat down on the iron roof.  The heat beat up from the tracks.  Red dust polluted the drinking water in the little upright tank.  Dust filled eyes, nostrils, hair.  Dust caked and grew stiff in the sweat that streamed down us.  Yet we stopped once at a station, and humans lived there and a man got off the train.  A lone lean babu and his leaner, more miserable native crew came out and eyed the train like vultures waiting for a beast to die.  But we did not die, and the train passed on into illimitable dusty redness, leaving them to watch the hot rails ribbon out behind our grumbling caboose.

There began to be carousing in the second-class compartment next ahead of us.  Our own Brown of Lumbwa produced a stone crock of Irish whisky from a basket, imbibed copiously, offered us in turn the glistening neck, looked relieved at our refusal, and grew voluble.