T was high morning when the Kaffir porters, jogging over a saddle of hill, checked and cried out at the far sight of the camp; but evening was at hand before they reached it. Lazaro, the half-caste interpreter, puffed to the front to take stock of it, staring down over the broken land with lowered brows. It lay in a little cup of valley, among those brooding hills that stretch south from Mount Irati toward the lost rivers of the heart of Mozambique. The one tent, which proclaimed it the habitation of a white man, shone under the strong sun like a patch of snow. Lazaro turned to call the news to his employer in the rear.
"See," he cried, pointing with a lean dramatic arm. "I have bring-a you to an Inglez. Tonight you will have a society."
Lazaro never failed to claim credit for any piece of good fortune that might occur; he waited now to be thanked for leading the party to this fortunate point.
His employer came briskly up the last of the slope, and gazed out over the world spread below under the sun—a world crumpled like paper into naked hills and abrupt valleys. She nodded briefly.
"I see," she said. "But what are we stopping for?"
Lazaro smiled resignedly. "Only to see," he answered, and called to the Kaffirs. The party strung out again on the downward slope, weaving in a ragged line through the rocks and clumps of aloe, with the red dust puffing up like smoke from under their feet. At the rear, Lazaro ranged himself alongside of Miss Gregory to indulge her with conversation. He had been chosen for his post by a British consul down country, chiefly because of his skill in avoiding danger, but partly also because he spoke a fluent and recognizable English. The consul, who had lived most of his life in the tropics, disapproved of globe-trotting for ladies. Miss Gregory's project for a journey of half a year in the unknown interior seemed to him hardly proper; and he felt it due to her family that she should not move out of hearing of the English tongue, at least. Therefore he had prevailed on her to accept Lazaro.
"He is said to steal quite a lot," he told her, while Lazaro shuffled his toes in the sand outside the consular veranda and smiled sidelong, "and perhaps he's not very clean; but think of the advantage of having somebody to talk to."
So Miss Gregory had become Lazaro's master, and had fulfilled the consul's good intentions by listening to the complacent singsong of his voice across nearly two thousand miles of wilderness. She hastened now to forestall his small talk with a question.
"Do you know whose camp it can be?" she inquired.
"It can be anybody," answered Lazaro pleasantly, "but not many. Only three-four white men come up here—all Inglez, all very bad people."
"How?" demanded Miss Gregory.
"What you call bolt-from-a-police," explained Lazaro blandly. "Ye-es; very bad people."
"I see." Miss Gregory was not at all disturbed. She had already met the discreet outlaw of the Coast; and had not found him formidable. She was fifty years of age and a woman of the world, and her world was wide enough to accommodate human beings of all kinds. She had it in mind that her travels should result in a book—a big book, full of meat, spiced with character and pungent with real raw life; and in the meantime she saw all men in the light of possible literary material. Even Lazaro was down in her note-book.
From the heights the little camp had seemed to lie just below, near enough to shout to; but there was a day of hard going across rough spurs of hill and straggling thickets of aloe and cactus before Miss Gregory and her party came forth at last to the cool stillness of the little valley in which the one tent was pitched. A last tangle of spiked shrubs let them through, and Miss Gregory stepped forth on to short parched grass within fifty yards of the tent. The sun was already over the hills to the west, and the world was beginning to breathe again after its day-long torpor of heat. Beyond the tent, cooking-fires were sending up their thin spires of blue smoke; about them, Kaffirs moved babbling, and a single white man, conspicuous in shirt and trousers among their sleek bare bodies, stood with his back toward her. There seemed to be some business going forward; his voice sounded in curt queries and was answered with obsequious clamour.
As Miss Gregory advanced, with Lazaro beside and a little behind her and the Kaffirs straggling in the rear, he turned and caught sight of her. He stared for a moment, as well he might, for white women do not come within a month's journey of that part of the world; but he recovered himself with creditable quickness, and came striding to meet her.