ANN ANDERSON.
P.S. If you ever get to England and back Reading way, give my love to the Miss Calthorps and go in and see my Uncle at the shop and say I'm trying to do my duty out here and he isn't to bother. I think perhaps you'd better not go near Mrs. Baines—John's mother. You never know how she'll take things. She was that set on John.
December 1.
Ali bin Ferhani's pretty sure to-day he can get these letters through, so off this goes. I forgot to say that we're going to bury John and Mr. Bayley side by side in the pit we dug in the middle of the station. Eb is not in a fit state to be consulted, though his temperature seems going down. But I've decided for him. As soon as I can get about without too much aches and pains I shall see it done. If you get home you might communicate with the East African Mission and arrange for a Stone to be sent out to be put up over the grave. Somehow it seems to me John wants to be buried there. It may bring good luck to Hangodi.
ANN.
CHAPTER XIII
THE RETURN TO UNGUJA
Up the scarcely-discernible path they climbed, leaving the Happy Valley behind them; over the foothills and under cliff at the base of the northern escarpment, where the gaily flowering bushes in their early spring display gave way to tall forest trees, hung with lianas. The black Colobus monkeys with their white-plumed tails chattered and showed their teeth and flopped from branch to branch in the leafy canopy, not used to this tumultuous invasion of their solitudes. Then suddenly the escarpment rose like the wall of a Babel towering into Heaven. How could any way for human beings walking on two legs be found up these precipices? But despite its savagery there is scarcely one of Africa's fastnesses that has not been trodden by man, and although the practised route into the Happy Valley was from the south, and though its encompassing walls of cliff on either side and at the northern end of its lake seemed impassable, there were ways up and over them known to the Masai and Hamitic and Nilotic peoples of this sequestered rift valley.
Up some such Via mala the Masai guides were now leading Brentham's caravan, with little concern for the trepidation it caused. The white man and woman and the silently suffering Goanese cook had been obliged to descend from their donkeys and trudge with the porters. The donkeys, in fact, were sent to the rear of the procession, and Brentham walked in front with the guides and a few disencumbered porters to help Lucy over an ascent which would have been thought rough climbing in the Alps, and here had to be made without any paraphernalia of ropes and irons.
Lucy sometimes had to shut her eyes and hold her body rigidly pressed against the wall of rock that she might recover from vertigo and continue with shaking legs her ascent of a twisting path, sometimes only fifteen inches broad where it overhung an abyss. Roger was beside himself with anxiety. He cast about in his mind for safeguards—Ropes? But they had none. Lengths of cotton cloth? But how get at them and apply them, when any extra movement might turn Lucy giddy and precipitate her into the tree-tops far below? Their taciturn Masai guides, pledged only to show them the way to Kilimanjaro, had given them no warning of what the path was like from the lake shore, between three and four thousand feet above sea level, to the top of the escarpment at seven thousand feet.