Away from the lake shore, in a detour through the foot-hills, they met a few wandering Masai on their way to trade at the Mission station. They greeted Roger with acclamations of friendship and much spitting. Without an interpreter he could not understand them, but they kept pointing to the north-west and evidently referring to the wicked Stolzenberg under their name of Oleduria ("The Terror"); and at the same time to "God"—Engai. They talked with the satisfied tone of a thing now settled, and went on their way to interview the Woman-chief who was their medical adviser, and would-be converter.
"They may have heard of Ann's letter," said Roger, "and believe her curse is coming off. Do you see where they were pointing? ... That curious cloud that seems to be rising high in the air, rising and falling, as though one of the craters were showing signs of activity?"
As soon as he returned to Magara, Roger drew up a formal complaint against Stolzenberg, addressed to the officer commanding in Irangi. He set forth the long tale of misdeeds on the part of "The Terror" during the past ten years and urged the German authority for the good name of the Empire to arrest and try this bandit. If this were not done, he would be compelled to place all the facts before the German directors of the Concessionaire Company whose employés' people and property suffered so much from Stolzenberg's raids and violence. The maiming of the Masai messenger was a concrete case, whatever might be thought of the offence in slaughtering the flamingoes, birds whose guano was one of the Concession's assets.
A fortnight later a military force of one hundred Askari and two twelve-pounder mountain guns arrived at Wilhelmshöhe—as the entire scattered settlement of the Concession in the Iraku Hills was called (at the request of the Schräders: the Stotts never got nearer the pronunciation than "Williamshoe"). The force was commanded by two smart-looking German lieutenants and a white Feldwebel. The lieutenants, who saluted Brentham as Herr Major, said they were to act under his orders. He was commissioned as a magistrate to proceed to the Red Crater and arrest Adolf Stolzenberg, but not supposed to take any part in the fighting, if force was to be used. That was their business. The Herr Oberst who had sent them remembered that Major Brentham had been wounded in the South African War, and hoped he would take care of himself; if his health was not equal to the journey, then the nearest German district commissioner would go instead. But Roger, in spite of his wife's pleadings and Maud's warnings, was keen to see the thing through. Besides, he could serve as guide. So in course of time the expedition found itself drawn up on the grassy plateau and facing the heavy wooden door and stone wall. A summons to open in the name of the law was shouted by the Feldwebel, who had an immense voice. There was no response. Then the guns, put into position, came into play and shattered the door to fragments. One of the lieutenants and half the force marched in.... Half an hour elapsed.... Then the lieutenant reappeared with rather a scared face.
"We can only suppose either that Stolzenberg fled some time ago, or that his settlement has simply been engulfed by some appalling volcanic action. Come in and see!"
Roger and the rest of the force followed. Inside the Red Crater, which enclosed a space about a mile in diameter, very little could at first be seen but clouds of sulphurous vapours, which when wafted in their direction nearly stifled them; and clouds of steam where the little stream from the hidden pool at the further end of the crater fell into some gulf of heat——
They advanced cautiously; the wind took a different turn, and at last the rashest pioneers among them discerned the ground falling away abruptly over a sharp-cut edge into Hell—as a Dante might have deemed it. The sulphurous fumes drove them back. The inevitable conclusion—confirmed in time—was that the crater had reopened immediately beneath Stolzenberg's settlement. Houses, people, cattle had all been plunged into the bowels of the earth, hundreds of feet below to a fiery furnace. Those humans and cattle who were nearer the crater walls at the time had possibly been choked and killed by the gases. Indeed, on their way out, they saw here and there, at the bases of the red walls, dead cattle lying stiff, all four legs in the air. Evidently, inquisitive Masai, after the earthquake, had climbed the crater-rim from the outside and seen enough to guess that the white Woman-chief's curse had come home, and the great enemy of the Masai and his murderous band of raiders had gone suddenly to an awful doom.
CHAPTER XXII
EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED BY
Eight years have passed since Roger Brentham staggered, half stupefied with sulphur fumes, from the Red Crater; satisfied with a great sense of relief and no pity, that Stolzenberg and his raiding Ruga-ruga had come to a deserved end.