Curtis and Captain Good. It was in this way. I had been up elephant
hunting beyond Bamangwato, and had met with bad luck. Everything went
wrong that trip, and to top up with I got the fever badly. So soon as
I was well enough I trekked down to the Diamond Fields, sold such
ivory as I had, together with my wagon and oxen, discharged my
hunters, and took the post-cart to the Cape. After spending a week in
Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having
seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens,
which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit on the country, and
the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the
sort, I determined to go back to Natal by the /Dunkeld/, then lying at
the docks waiting for the /Edinburgh Castle/ due in from England. I
took my berth and went aboard, and that afternoon the Natal passengers
from the /Edinburgh Castle/ transhipped, and we weighed and put to
sea.

Among these passengers who came on board were two who excited my
curiosity. One, a gentleman of about thirty, was perhaps the biggest-
chested and longest-armed man I ever saw. He had yellow hair, a thick
yellow beard, clear-cut features, and large grey eyes set deep in his
head. I never saw a finer-looking man, and somehow he reminded me of
an ancient Dane. Not that I know much of ancient Danes, though I knew
a modern Dane who did me out of ten pounds; but I remember once seeing
a picture of some of those gentry, who, I take it, were a kind of
white Zulus. They were drinking out of big horns, and their long hair
hung down their backs. As I looked at my friend standing there by the
companion-ladder, I thought that if he only let his grow a little, put
one of those chain shirts on to his great shoulders, and took hold of
a battle-axe and a horn mug, he might have sat as a model for that
picture. And by the way it is a curious thing, and just shows how the