"Oh! I'm going where you go," I said, "and where I go Hans will go.
Savage must speak for himself."

This he did and to the same effect, being a very honest and faithful
man. It was the more to his credit since, as he informed me in private,
he did not enjoy African adventure and often dreamed at nights of
his comfortable room at Ragnall whence he superintended the social
activities of that great establishment.

So we departed and marched for the matter of a month or more through
every kind of country. After we had passed the head of the great lake
wherein lay the island, if it really was an island, where the Pongo used
to dwell (one clear morning through my glasses I discerned the mountain
top that marked the former residence of the Mother of the Flower, and by
contrast it made me feel quite homesick), we struck up north, following
a route known to Babemba and our guides. After this we steered by the
stars through a land with very few inhabitants, timid and nondescript
folk who dwelt in scattered villages and scarcely understood the art of
cultivating the soil, even in its most primitive form.

A hundred miles or so farther on these villages ceased and thenceforward
we only encountered some nomads, little bushmen who lived on game which
they shot with poisoned arrows. Once they attacked us and killed two
of the Mazitu with those horrid arrows, against the venom of which no
remedy that we had in our medicine chest proved of any avail. On this
occasion Savage exhibited his courage if not his discretion, for rushing
out of our thorn fence, after missing a bushmen with both barrels at a
distance of five yards--he was, I think, the worst shot I ever saw--he
seized the little viper with his hands and dragged him back to camp. How
Savage escaped with his life I do not know, for one poisoned arrow went