I Had Nearly Reached The Foot Of This Wall And Made My Mind Up To
Turn In For The Night Under A Rock, When I Heard A Melancholy Croak
Away In The Mist To The Left.
I went towards it and found Xenia
lost on his own account, and distinctly quaint in manner, and then I
recollected that I had been warned Xenia is slightly crazy.
Nice
situation this: a madman on a mountain in the mist. Xenia, I
found, had no longer got my black bag, but in its place a lid of a
saucepan and an empty lantern. To put it mildly, this is not the
sort of outfit the R.G.S. Hints to Travellers would recommend for
African exploration. Xenia reported that he gave the bag to Black
boy, who shortly afterwards disappeared, and that he had neither
seen him nor any of the others since, and didn't expect to this side
of Srahmandazi. In a homicidal state of mind, I made tracks for the
missing ones followed by Xenia. I thought mayhap they had grown on
to the rocks they had sat upon so long, but presently, just before
it became quite dark, we picked up the place we had left them in and
found there only an empty soda-water bottle. Xenia poured out a
muddled mass of observations to the effect that "they got fright too
much about them water palaver."
I did not linger to raise a monument to them, but I said I wished
they were in a condition to require one, and we went on over our
hillocks with more confidence now that we knew we had stuck well to
our unmarked track.
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