“Bwana taking off tunic and belts,” said Ali Suleiman, “and I carry them. Bwana keep only revolver, by damn, please God, sah.”
A bright idea! Why not? Where was the sense in marching through these foul swamps and jungles as though it were along the Queen’s Road at Bombay? And Ali, who would rather die than carry a load upon his head, like a low shenzi of a porter, would be proud to carry his master’s sword and personal kit.
In his shirt-sleeves, with exposed chest, Bertram felt another man, gave the signal to advance, and proceeded free of all impedimenta save his revolver. . . .
Suddenly the narrow, walled-in path debouched into a most beautiful open glade of trees like live oaks. These were not massed together; there was no undergrowth of bush; the grass was short and fine; the ground sloping slightly upward was gravelly and dry—the whole spot one of Africa’s freakish contrasts.
Bertram determined to halt the whole safari here, get it “closed up” into something like fours, and see every man, including the rear-guard, into the place before starting off again.
With the help of Ali, who interpreted to the headmen, he achieved his object, and, when he had satisfied himself that it was a case of “all present and correct,” he returned to the head of the column and sat him down upon the trunk of a fallen tree. . . .
Everybody, save the sentries, whom he had posted about the glade, squatted or lay upon the ground, each man beside his load. . . .
Though free now of the horrible sense of suffocation, he felt sick and faint, and very weary. Although he had not had a proper meal since he left the Barjordan, he was not hungry—or thought he was not. . . . Would it be his luck to be killed in the first fight that he took part in? His good luck? When one is ill and half starved, weary beyond words, and bearing a nightmare burden of responsibility in conditions as comfortless and rough as they can well be, Death seems less a grisly terror than a friend, bearing an Order of Release in his bony hand. . . .
Ali stood before him unbuckling his haversack.
“Please God, sah, I am buying Bwana this chocolates in Mombasa when finding master got no grubs for emergency rasher,” said he, producing a big blue packet of chocolate.