watched dejectedly, as they used an axe to knock the bottoms out of the dug-out canoes that were drawn up on the little white beach.
'Can we swim across?' he asked Mohammed in a whisper, and Mohammed's face crumpled with horror, as he considered the suggestion. Both of them peered out through the reeds across a quarter of a mile of deep water that flowed so fast, its surface war-dimpled with tiny whirlpools.
'No,'said Mohammed with finality.
'Too far? 'asked Sebastian hopelessly.
'Too far, Too fast. Too deep. Too many crocodiles,'
agreed Mohammed, and in an unspoken but mutual desire to get away from the river and the Askari, they crawled out of the reed-bank and crept away inland.
In the late afternoon they were lying up in a bushy gully about two miles from the river and an equal distance from M'tapa's village.
'What should we do now, Manali?' Mohammed repeated his question, and Sebastian cleared his throat before answering.
'Well...' he said and paused while his wide brow wrinkled in the agony of creative thought. Then it came to him with all the splendour of a sunrise. 'We'll just jolly well have to find some other way of getting across the river.' He said it with the air of a man well pleased with his own perspicacity. 'What do you suggest, Mohammed?'
A little surprised to find the ball returned so neatly into his own court, Mohammed remained silent.
'A raft?' hazarded Sebastian. The lack of tools, material and opportunity to build one was so obvious, that Mohammed did not deign to reply. He shook his head.
'No,' agreed Sebastian. 'Perhaps you are right.' Again the classic beauty of his features was marred by a scowl of concentration. At last he demanded, 'There are other villages along the river?'
'Yes,' Mohammed conceded. 'But the Askari will visit each of them and destroy the canoes. Also they will tell the headmen who we are, and threaten them with the rope.'
'But they cannot cover the whole river. It has a frontier of five or six hundred miles. We'll just keep walking until we find a canoe. It may take us a long time but we'll find one eventually.'
'If the Askari don't catch us first.'
'They'll expect us to stay close to the border. We'll make a detour well inland, and march for five or six days before we come back to the river again. We'll rest now and move tonight.'
Heading on a diagonal line of march away from the Rovuma and deeper into German territory, moving north-west along a well defined footpath, the four of them kept walking all that night. As the slow hours passed so the pace flagged and twice Sebastian noticed one or other of his men wander off the path at an angle until suddenly they started and looked about in surprise, before hurrying back to join the others. It puzzled him and he meant to ask them what they were doing, but he was tired and the effort of speech was too great. An hour later he found the reason for their behaviour.
Plodding along, with the movement of his legs becoming completely automatic, Sebastian was slowly overcome by a state of gentle well-being. He surrendered to it and let the warm, dark mists of oblivion wash over his mind.
The sting of a thorn branch across his cheek jerked him back to consciousness and he looked about in bewilderment.
Ten yards away on his flank, Mohammed and the two gun boys walked along the path in single file, their faces turned towards him with expressions of mild interest in the moonlight. It took some moments for Sebastian to realize that he had fallen asleep on his feet. Feeling a complete ass, he trotted back to take his place at the head of the line.
When the fat silver moon sank below the trees, they kept going by the faint glow of reflected light, but slowly that waned until the footpath hardly showed at their feet.
Sebastian decided that dawn could be only an hour away and it was time to halt. He stopped and was about to speak when Mohammed's clutching hand on his shoulder prevented him.
'Manali!' There was a to tie in Mohammed's whisper that cautioned him, and Sebastian felt his nerves jerk taut.
'What is it?' he breathed, protectively unslinging the Mauser.
'Look. There ahead of us.'
Screwing up his eyes Sebastian searched the blackness ahead, and it was a long time before the faint ruddiness in the solid blanket of darkness registered itself upon the exhausted retinas of his eyes. 'Yes!' he whispered. 'What is it?'
'A fire,' breathed Mohammed. 'There is someone camped across the path in front of us.'
'Askari?'asked Sebastian.
'Perhaps.'
Peering at the ruby puddle of dying coals, Sebastian felt the hair on the back of his neck stir and come erect with alarm. He was fully awake now. 'We must go around them.'
'No. They will see our spoor in the dust of the path and they will follow us,' Mohammed demurred.
'What then?'
'First let me see how many there are.'
Without waiting for Sebastian's permission, Mohammed slipped away and disappeared into the night like aleopard.
Five anxious minutes Sebastian waited. Once he thought he heard a scuffling sound but he was not certain.
Mohammed's shape materialized again beside him. 'Ten of them,' he reported. 'Two Askari and eight bearers. One of the Askari sat guard by the fire. He saw me, so I killed him.'
'Good God!' Sebastian's voice rose higher. 'You did what?'
'I killed him. But do not speak so loud.'
'How?'
'With my knife.'
'Lest he kill me first.'
'And the other?'
'Him also.'
'You killed both of them?' Sebastian was appalled.
'Yes, and took their rifles. Now it is safe to go on. But the bearers have with them many cases. It comes to me that this party follows after Bwana Intambu, the German commissioner, and that they carry with them all his goods.'
'But you shouldn't have killed them,' protested Sebastian. 'You could have just tied them up or something.'
'Manali, you argue like a woman,' Mohammed snapped impatiently, and then went on with his original line of thought. 'Among the cases is one that by its size I think is the box for the tax money. The one Askari slept with his back against it as though to give it special care.'
'The tax money?'
'Yes.
'Well, son of a gun!' Sebastian's scruples dissolved and in the darkness his expression was suddenly transformed into that of a small boy on Christmas morning.
They woke the German bearers by standing over them and prodding them with the rifle barrels. Then they hustled them out of their blankets and herded them into a small group, bewildered and shivering miserably in the chill of dawn. Wood was heaped on the fire; it burned up brightly, and by its light Sebastian examined the booty.
The one Askari had bled profusely from the throat on to the small wooden chest. Mohammed took him by the heels and dragged him out of the way, then used his blanket to wipe the chest clean.
'Manali,' he said with reverence. 'See the big lock. See the bird of the Kaiser painted on the lid...' He stooped over the chest and took a grip on the handles, but most of all, feel the weight of it.'
Amongst the other equipment around the fire, Mohammed found a thick coil of one-inch manila rope. A commodity which was essential equipment on any of Herman Fleischer's safaris. With it, Mohammed roped the bearers together, at waist level, allowing enough line between each of them to make concerted movement possible but preventing individual flight.
'Why are you doing that?' Sebastian asked with interest, through a mouthful of blood sausage and black bread. Most of the other boxes were filled with food, and Sebastian was breakfasting well and heartily.
'So they cannot escape.'
'We're not taking them with us are we?'
'Who else will carry all this? 'Mohammed asked patiently.
Five days later Sebastian was seated in the bows of a long dug-out canoe, with the charred soles of his boots set firmly on the chest that lay in the bilges. He was eating with relish a thick sandwich of polo ny and picked onions, wearing a change of clean underwear and socks that were a few sizes too large, and there was clutched in his left hand an open bottle of Hansa beer all these with the courtesy of Commissioner Fleischer.
The paddlers were singing with unforced gaiety, for the hiring fee that Sebastian had paid them would buy each of them a new wife at least.
Hugging the bank of the Rovurna on the Portuguese side, driven on by willing paddles and the eager current, in twelve hours they covered the distance that it had taken Sebastian and his heavily-laden bearers five days on foot.
The canoe deposited Sebastian's party at the landing opposite M'tapa's village, only ten miles from Lalapanzi.
They walked that distance without resting and arrived after nightfall.
