"Whither do you go?"
The chief of the wanderers, an old man remarkably gifted—for his beard was long and white, and reached to his waist—stuck his spear head down in the earth.
"Lord, we go to a place which is written," he said; "for Idoosi has said, 'Go forth to the natives at war, they that fight by the river; on the swift water shall you go, even against the water'—many times have we come to the river, master, but ever have we turned back; but now it seems that the prophecy has been fulfilled, for there are bleeding men in these holes and the sound of thunders."
The People of the Well crossed to the Isisi, using the canoes of the Akasava headmen, and made a slow progress through territory which gave them no opportunity of exercising their hobby, since water lay less than a spade's length beneath the driest ground.
"Poor old Sanders," said Hamilton ruefully, when he was again on the Zaire, "I've so mixed up his people that he'll have to get a new map made to find them again."
"You might tell me off to show him round, sir," suggested Bones, but Hamilton did not jump at the offer.
He was getting more than a little rattled. Sanders was due back in a month, and it seemed that scarcely a week passed but some complication arose that further entangled a situation which was already too full of loose and straying threads for his liking.
"I suppose the country is settled for a week at any rate," he said with a little sigh of relief—but he reckoned without his People of the Well.
They moved, a straggling body of men and women, with their stiff walk and their doleful song, a wild people with strange, pinched faces and long black hair, along the river's edge.
A week's journeyings brought them to the Ochori country and to Bosambo, who was holding a most important palaver.