So next morning at the dawn I headed north by west, laying my course for that white patch and for the first time breaking the straight line of our advance.  Captain Robertson, whose temper had not been bettered by prolonged and frightful anxiety, or I may add, by his unaccustomed abstinence, asked me rather roughly why I was altering the course.

“Look here, Captain,” I answered, “if we were at sea and you did something of the sort, I should not put such a question to you, and if by any chance I did, I should not expect you to answer.  Well, by your own wish I am in command here and I think that the same argument holds.”

“Yes,” he replied.  “I suppose you have studied your chart, if there is any of this God-forsaken country, and at any rate discipline is discipline.  So steam ahead and don’t mind me.”

The others accepted my decision without comment; most of them were so miserable that they did not care which way we went, also they were good enough to repose confidence in my judgment.

“Doubtless the Baas has reasons,” said Hans dubiously, “although the spoor, when last we saw it, headed towards the rising sun and as the country is all the same, I do not see why those man-eaters should have returned.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have reasons,” although in fact I had none at all.

Hans surveyed me with a watery eye as though waiting for me to explain them, but I looked haughty and declined to oblige.

“The Baas has reasons,” continued Hans, “for taking us on what I think to be the wrong side of that great ridge, there to hunt for the spoor of the men-eaters, and they are so deep down in his mind that he cannot dig them up for poor old Hans to look at.  Well, the Baas wears the Great Medicine and perhaps it is there that the reasons sit.  Those Strathmuir fellows say that they can go no further and wish to die.  Umslopogaas has just gone to them with his axe to tell them that he is ready to help them to their wish.  Look, he has got there, for they are coming quickly, who after all prefer to live.”

Well, we started for my white patch of stones which no one else had noticed and of which I said nothing to anyone, and reached it by the following evening, to find, as I expected, that it was a lime outcrop.

By now we were in a poor way, for we had practically nothing left to eat, which did not tend to raise the spirits of the party.  Also that lime outcrop proved to be an uninteresting spot overlooking a wide valley which seemed to suggest that there were other valleys of a similar sort beyond it, and nothing more.

Captain Robertson sat stern-faced and despondent at a distance muttering into his beard, as had become a habit with him.  Umslopogaas leaned upon his axe and contemplated the heavens, also occasionally the Strathmuir men who cowered beneath his eye.  The Zulus squatted about sharing such snuff as remained to them in economic pinches.  Goroko, the witch-doctor, engaged himself in consulting his “Spirit,” by means of bone-throwing, upon the humble subject of whether or no we should succeed in killing any game for food to-morrow, a point on which I gathered that his “Spirit” was quite uncertain.  In short, the gloom was deep and universal and the sky looked as though it were going to rain.