'The Bwana said I was never to leave the Ba-Mama[[1]] alone in the forest,' protested Changalilo.
[[1]] Ba-Mama—lit. "Grandmothers" (plur.). The respectful term for all influential ladies—white women or native princesses.
'What Bwana?' asked Dick.
'Bwana A-ri-shy,'[[2]] replied Changalilo firmly.
[[2]] The Awemba cannot pronounce consecutive consonants without inserting a vowel. Changalilo meant Archie.
As Norah retraced her steps, she repeated Changalilo's words. He still regarded her as Archie's possession. In her scorn for the condemnation of others, it had never entered her head to consider the opinion of the natives on her flight with Dick. She knew that while the Chiwemba tongue contains no word for a virgin—an ideal that is unfamiliar to this direct people—they looked with an unsympathetic eye on adultery. The code of the good old days, before the white men came, allotted death, she believed, to the guilty pair. Fantastically enough, the existence of this point of view in a backward and little known people carried weight with her.
She dismissed it from her mind and faced the danger that confronted her. The practical side of her nature was uppermost. She saw that two factors—Time and Food—dominated the situation and threatened to sign the death warrant. She could not shorten the days that must precede a rescue, she could increase the food supply. Fish there must be in the lake, fruit there might be in the ruins. As she had no fishing tackle, she decided first to explore the mission.
As she approached the ruined tower, the superstitious dread which the place inspired in her was reinforced by a more concrete fear of snakes. She was a better zoologist than Omar, and knew that 'the keeping of courts where Jamshyd gloried' was more probably entrusted to puff adders and cobras than to lions and leopards.
But fruit trees would have been planted near monastery walls, and to the need for food terrors, supernatural and material, must yield.
As she picked her way through the long grass which surrounded the tower, her foot touched masonry. Treading cautiously, she identified the remnants of a flight of broad steps that once, she supposed, led to the lake. Now their easy gradient was distorted and reft. At one point they ceased completely, at others they slanted drunkenly. The grass that covered them, knee high, made the ascent dangerous.