Roger determined to shut Lucy out of his thoughts as much as possible, to think only for the day, for the dangers by which they were surrounded, the hundred risks which attended their ever getting back to civilization.... As soon as they could reach the coast he would send Lucy to England and return to his Consulate at Medinat-al-barkah.... Of course, should John Baines die of fever—missionaries often did—or—if—he were killed? ... Suppose his station really was attacked...? But then, again, such thoughts as these were of the order of David's when he hankered after Bathsheba....
And then Lucy, again, Lucy might die of fever—she scarcely seemed cut out for an African life, which is why he had begun pitying her.....
"I've had perfectly splendid sport to-day," said Roger, standing before Lucy's "baraza" where the camp table was laid for tea. "I've shot a rhino—they're cutting it up now—two hartebeests, and two impala. That'll give us all the 'biltong' we can carry. I'm filthily dirty, as you can see—ash and charcoal from the burnt bush, and sweat—God! It has been sweltering!—and the run after that—and from that—rhino! No. I'm not wounded—there's no need for emotion—but the rhino as he charged—and I doubled—squirted blood over me from his nostrils—I must look like a fighting chimney sweep—I'll go and have a bath and then you shall give me tea."
"Don't be long," said Lucy. "There's such lots to talk about. Your men have come back from Hangodi with a note to me from John! He says so far 'all's well.' And two Masai, Halima says, are waiting to see you. They keep saying 'Sitoto,' which means, I suppose, some news about the Stotts' whereabouts. How exciting it's all getting. I am enjoying it!"
"Halima" (to her maid): "Waambia watu wa mpishi tunataka chai, marra moja!"
Four days afterwards, everything being ready for the fresh venture into the unknown, loads lightened and tightened, and the biltong sufficiently dry to be tied on top of the loads (imparting a disagreeable smell of a butcher's shop to the caravan as it passed in single file), they set out with Masai guides to find the Stotts. They travelled over the water-parting from the rivers flowing to the Indian Ocean to those that ended in vague marshes and bitter lakes. They climbed great escarpments and descended into broad valleys between high cliffs and found themselves amongst strange peoples, chiefly pastoral, keepers of great herds of sleek, humped cattle, of dwarf African goats and fat-tailed sheep.
The first of these, the Warangi, were fortunately allied in speech to the Wagogo—so could be communicated with. They were a truculent lot, inclined to make trouble with strangers. They seemed on this occasion, however, too much excited over affairs of their own to be much interested in the arrival of white folk, whom they had probably never seen before except in the form of pale-faced Arabs. They replied briefly that a white man and woman and their children had preceded Brentham's party by a few days—when the moon was still at the full. They were accompanied by a band of Masai with whom the Warangi were friends....
"Are there any Arabs here?" asked Brentham through his interpreter. "Waalabu?" No! They came sometimes to buy ivory, but on their last visit they had tried to carry off some Rangi people as slaves, and if they showed their faces again in Burangi, they would be driven away.
"Then what are you all so excited about?"
They replied it was an affair of their clan, of the people who lived in these villages. Their young married men had gone out this dry season to kill elephants as was their custom, but had returned after three months with no luck at all: hardly a tusk worth looking at, very little meat, and two men killed by the elephants. There could be but one explanation for this. Their wives had been unfaithful to them as soon as their backs were turned. It was well known that if a wife and husband were separated and the wife was unfaithful, a misfortune at once fell on the husband. Consequently the custom of their tribe in such cases was to burn the guilty women on large pyres of brushwood. These pyres were now finished—the white man could see them there along the bank of the river.... Presently the adulterous ladies whose husbands had returned from the luckless elephant-shoot would be led out, tied to the brushwood bundles, and set on fire. He might stay and witness the imposing spectacle if he chose. They learnt that he too was accompanied by a wife—a white woman. It might be a moral lesson to her—if white women were ever unfaithful....