nerves, and that night by the camp-fires there was no pleasant talk;
all talking at once of meat they had eaten and cattle that each one
owned, but a gloomy silence hung by every fire and the little canvas
shelters. They told the white men that Bwona Khubla's city, of which
he had thought at the last (and where the natives believed he was once
a king), of which he had raved till the loneliness rang with his
raving, had settled down all about them; and they were afraid, for it
was so strange a city, and wanted more dow. And the two travelers
gave them more quinine, for they saw real fear in their faces, and
knew they might run away and leave them alone in that place, that
they, too, had come to fear with an almost equal dread, though they
knew not why. And as the night wore on their feeling of boding
deepened, although they had shared three bottles or so of champagne
that they meant to keep for days when they killed a lion.

This is the story that each of those two men tell, and which their
porters corroborate, but then a Kikuyu will always say whatever he
thinks is expected of him.

The travelers were both in bed and trying to sleep but not able to do
so because of an ominous feeling. That mournfullest of all the cries
of the wild, the hyæna like a damned soul lamenting, strangely enough
had ceased. The night wore on to the hour when Bwona Khubla had died
three or four years ago, dreaming and raving of "his city"; and in the
hush a sound softly arose, like a wind at first, then like the roar of
beasts, then unmistakably the sound of motors--motors and motor
busses.

And then they saw, clearly and unmistakably they say, in that lonely
desolation where the equator comes up out of the forest and climbs