"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."

"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some more
port."

Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began--

"It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's
country. It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got into
power--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the Bapedi
people had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the interior,
and so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and came straight away
from Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky thing to
go into the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew that
there were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined
to have a try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so tough
from continual knocking about that I did not set it down at much.

"Well, I got on all right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautiful
piece of bush veldt, with great ranges of mountains running through it,
and round granite koppies starting up here and there, looking out like
sentinels over the rolling waste of bush. But it is very hot--hot as a
stew-pan--and when I was there that March, which, of course, is autumn
in this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every morning,
as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to creep from the
waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a
long line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossed