The fact was at this time the few people who lived at Lorenzo Marquez
were too sodden with liquor and other vices to take any interest in
outside news that did not immediately concern them. Moreover, the
natives whom they flogged and oppressed if they were their servants, or
fought with if they were not, told them little, and almost nothing that
was true, for between the two races there was an hereditary hate
stretching back for generations. So from the Portuguese I gained no
information.

Then I turned to the Kaffirs, especially to those from whom I had bought
the cattle. _They_ had heard that some Boers reached the banks of the
Crocodile moons ago--how many they could not tell. But that country,
they said, was under the rule of a chief who was hostile to them, and
killed any of their people who ventured thither. Therefore they knew
nothing for certain. Still, one of them stated that a woman whom he had
bought as a slave, and who had passed through the district in question a
few weeks before, told him that someone had told her that these Boers
were all dead of sickness. She added that she had seen their wagon caps
from a distance, so, if they were dead, "their wagons were still alive."

I asked to see this woman, but the native refused to produce her. After
a great deal of talk, however, he offered to sell her to me, saying that
he was tired of her. So I bargained with the man and finally agreed for
her purchase for three pounds of copper wire and eight yards of blue
cloth. Next morning she was produced, an extremely ugly person with a
large, flat nose, who came from somewhere in the interior of Africa,
having, I gathered, been taken captive by Arabs and sold from hand to
hand. Her name, as near as I can pronounce it, was Jeel.