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her voyage, the unhappy crew breathed sulphur fumes and drank sulphur water and ate sulphurated rice.
    Bones came down to the quay, a strange and awesome spectacle; a thin veil of antiseptic gauze hung from the edges of his helmet like a curtain, and on his hands were odorous gloves.
    “Hail to the bride!” snarled Hamilton from the bridge. “Where’s your orange blossom, Birdie?”
    “I order you to keep away from the Ochori,” cried Bones in a muffled voice. “There’s measles there – drink nothing but Lithia water…”
    Hamilton replied offensively.
     
    *  *  *
     
    There runs between the Pool of the Silent Ones and the Lesser Isisi, a strip of land which is neither forest nor swamp, and yet is of the nature of both. Here grow coarse trees that survive even the parasitical growths which shoot upward in one humid night to the height of a tall man; and here come the silent ones to sleep between trees, secure in the swamps that surround them and the guardianship of those little birds who love crocodiles and stand sentinel over them when they slumber. Of other birds there are few; other beasts do not come to the Wood of the Waters, and the elephants’ playing ground is on the firmer shore of the river. Here they have levelled the trees and stamped the earth flat, so that they may gambol and chase one another, and the calves may fight to the applause of trumpetings and waving trunks. There are many rotting huts in the Wood of the Waters, for the Isisi send here the old, the blind, and the mad, that they may die without distressing the whole and the sane. Sometimes they kill one another, but generally a scaly form creeps up from the mud and knocks them into the water with its quick tail, and there is an end.
    Mr Commissioner Sanders was mad, but not slayable, by reason of his soldiers, his long-nosed “wung-wung” (so they called his hotchkiss) and the brass-jacketted guns that said “ha-ha-ha!”
    Nobody but a madman would go squelching through the noisome mud of the wood, peering into foul huts, raking over ground for signs of skeletons (all that the crocodiles did not take was the little red ants’ by right). Yet this is what Sandi did. He slowed his fine boat and brought her to the bank.
    “I have impressed upon Lulaga the impropriety of hastening the deaths of his relatives,” he said to Captain Hamilton of the Houssas, “and he has sworn by M’shimba and his own particular devil that there shall be no more blinding or old-age pensioning,” he added grimly.
    Hamilton smiled wearily. “‘The customs of the country must not be lightly overridden or checked,’” he quoted from a famous Instruction received from the Colonial Office in bygone days – there isn’t a Commissioner from K’sala to Tuli Drift who cannot recite it by heart, especially after dinner.
    “‘Nor,’” he went on, “‘should his religious observances or immemorial practices be too rudely suppressed, remembering that the native, under God’s providence, is a man and a brother.’”
    “Shut up!” snarled Sanders, but the inexorable Houssa was not to be suppressed.
    “‘He should be approached gently,’” he went on, “‘with arguments and illustrations obvious to his simple mind. Corporal punishment must under no circumstances be inflicted save in exceptionally serious crimes, and then only by order of the supreme judiciary of the country – ’”
    “That looks to me like a new hut,” said Sanders, and stepped over the hastily rigged gangway, twirling a mahogany stick in his thin, brown hand.
    Threading his way through a green and anaemic plantation, he came to the hut, and there he found B’saba, sometime headman of the village of M’fusu, and B’saba was mad and silly and was chuckling and whimpering alternately, being far gone in sleeping sickness, which turns men into beasts. He was blind, and he had not been blind very long.
    The nose of Sandi elaka wrinkled.
    “O man, I see you, but you cannot see me.