“I told Stein. Stein said nothing: but I know that his blood boiled nobly. Then the firing began. It was just. Never was there such a revenge. We went from village to village. Everywhere the fires crackled up. Everywhere they ran screaming, the black pigs, women and all. Stein had the machine gun. The askaris knew what had to be done. By evening that forest was cleansed. I do not think the Waluguru will trouble us again. There is only one way of teaching savages.
“That night we slept in the mission. There was not room for all of us and so I and another gentleman went to rest in a little banda in the garden on a heap of sisal. There, too, the woman had been. It pained our hearts to think of that woman. But we knew she had been avenged. We had done our duty, even for our enemies. The place was full of whisky bottles. Worse luck! [idiom] they were all empty.
“That was the end of it. Next day we left Luguru. We never found the woman. I expect she went to Godovius. Trust Godovius for that. But one more thing we found. It was the body of another man, or as much as the hyenas and the white ants had left. No doubt he was an Englishman, though we did not know there was another there. He had a rifle with him, a Mannlicher, which I should have liked myself if I had not been forbidden to carry arms. The white ants had eaten most of his clothes and some wild beast had carried away one arm: but he had on him a little packet of letters, or rather notes. I picked them up and put them in my pocket, thinking there might be paper money therewith. If I had taken money it would not have harmed him. When I began to examine it I found that it was all written in English. He wrote badly, like a child, that man; and you may believe me or not—it was all notes on places in our colony: on good water holes and winter streams and things of that kind. It was an affair for the General Staff. You see he was a spy . . . an English spy, who had been killed by thirst or sickness and had his arm carried off by the hyenas. A brave man, perhaps. So . . . it was the right death for a spy. See, this was in the early days of the war, and already your spies were near Luguru!
“And now, Herr Doktor, you see how weak I am. You see how this simple story had tired me? Ah . . . this accursed climate! It weakens all of us. I think you too are pale. It will be a long time before I am fit to travel . . . the strain of a sea voyage. Is it not true? How can I thank you for all you have done for me?” He would have pressed my hand.
I left him. It seemed to me that the day was heavier than usual. I wished that the rains would come and have done with all this alternating oppression and boisterous wind. I left the camp. I went past a little garden where the children of some prisoners, little creatures with flaxen hair and blue eyes, were playing at soldiers, and walked due south until I came to the escarpment of the hills. Below me the levels of the Athi plains stretched without end, dun-coloured and dappled with huge shadows like the upper waters of the Bristol Channel, or rather of some vaster and more gloomy sea. It was an impressive and wholly soothing scene. I sat there until the sun had set, and on the remotest horizon the shadow of Kilimanjaro, a hundred miles away, rose against the sky. I sat there till it grew dark, and the great plains faded from me, thinking of the three men who died at Luguru: of James the martyr predestinate; of Godovius consumed in the flames which he had kindled; of M‘Crae whom Eva Burwarton had loved. It was very still. All the shallow life of Nairobi might have been as far away as the great mountain’s filmy shadow. And then, when I turned to make my way back in the darkness to the club, a sudden sound startled me. It was the beating of a drum in the lines of the King’s African Rifles. I stopped. In that moment I knew that for all our pretences of civilisation I was still living in a wholly savage land. I looked up to the sky, to the south with its strange spaces and unfamiliar stars. I saw Orion, the old hunter, stretched across the vault. The beating of the drum awakened some ancient adventurous spirit in my blood. I knew that this was the land above all others which men of European race have never conquered. It was a strange moment, full of a peculiar, half-bitter ecstasy. I gazed at the stars and murmured to myself: “This is Africa. . . . This is Africa.”