is to run up it with a spyglass. But you must be hungry, and

I am sure the dinner is cooked. Come in, my friends; it is but
a rough place, but well enough for these savage parts; and I

can tell you what, we have got -- a French cook.' And he led
the way on to the veranda.

As I was following him, and wondering what on earth he could
mean by this, there suddenly appeared, through the door that

opened on to the veranda from the house, a dapper little man,
dressed in a neat blue cotton suit, with shoes made of tanned

hide, and remarkable for a bustling air and most enormous black
mustachios, shaped into an upward curve, and coming to a point

for all the world like a pair of buffalo-horns.
'Madame bids me for to say that dinnar is sarved. Messieurs,

my compliments;' then suddenly perceiving Umslopogaas, who was
loitering along after us and playing with his battleaxe, he threw

up his hands in astonishment. 'Ah, mais quel homme!' he ejaculated
in French, 'quel sauvage affreux! Take but note of his huge

choppare and the great pit in his head.'
'Ay,' said Mr Mackenzie; 'what are you talking about, Alphonse?'

'Talking about!' replied the little Frenchman, his eyes still
fixed upon Umslopogaas, whose general appearance seemed to fascinate

him; 'why I talk of him' -- and he rudelypointed -- 'of ce monsieur noir.'
At this everybody began to laugh, and Umslopogaas, perceiving

that he was the object of remark, frowned ferociously, for he
had a most lordlydislike of anything like a personal liberty.

'Parbleu!' said Alphonse, 'he is angered -- he makes the grimace.
I like not his air. I vanish.' And he did with considerable rapidity.

Mr Mackenzie joined heartily in the shout of laughter which we
indulged in. 'He is a queer character -- Alphonse,' he said.

'By and by I will tell you his history; in the meanwhile let
us try his cooking.'

'Might I ask,' said Sir Henry, after we had eaten a most excellent
dinner, 'how you came to have a French cook in these wilds?'

'Oh,' answered Mrs Mackenzie, 'he arrived here of his own accord
about a year ago, and asked to be taken into our service.

He had got into some trouble in France, and fled to Zanzibar,
where he found an application had been made by the French Government

for his extradition. Whereupon he rushed off up-country, and
fell in, when nearly starved, with our caravan of men, who were

bringing us our annual supply of goods, and was brought on here.
You should get him to tell you the story.'

When dinner was over we lit our pipes, and Sir Henry proceeded
to give our host a description of our journey up here, over which

he looked very grave.
'It is evident to me,' he said, 'that those rascally Masai are

following you, and I am very thankful that you have reached this
house in safety. I do not think that they will dare to attack

you here. It is unfortunate, though, that nearly all my men
have gone down to the coast with ivory and goods. There are

two hundred of them in the caravan, and the consequence is that
I have not more than twenty men available for defensive purposes

in case they should attack us. But, still, I will just give
a few orders;' and, calling a black man who was loitering about

outside in the garden, he went to the window, and addressed him
in a Swahili dialect. The man listened, and then saluted and

departed.
'I am sure I devoutly hope that we shall bring no such calamity

upon you,' said I, anxiously, when he had taken his seat again.
'Rather than bring those bloodthirsty villains about your ears,

we will move on and take our chance.'
'You will do nothing of the sort. If the Masai come, they come,

and there is an end on it; and I think we can give them a pretty
warm greeting. I would not show any man the door for all the

Masai in the world.'
'That reminds me,' I said, 'the Consul at Lamu told me that he

had had a letter from you, in which you said that a man had arrived
here who reported that he had come across a white people in the

interior. Do you think that there was any truth in his story?
I ask, because I have once or twice in my life heard rumours

from natives who have come down from the far north of the existence
of such a race.'

Mr Mackenzie, by way of answer, went out of the room and returned,
bringing with him a most curious sword. It was long, and all

the blade, which was very thick and heavy, was to within a quarter
of an inch of the cutting edge worked into an ornamental pattern

exactly as we work soft wood with a fret-saw, the steel, however,
being invariably pierced in such a way as not to interfere with

the strength of the sword. This in itself was sufficiently curious,
but what was still more so was that all the edges of the hollow

spaces cut through the substance of the blade were most beautifully
inlaid with gold, which was in some way that I cannot understand

welded on to the steel {Endnote 5}.
'There,' said Mr Mackenzie, 'did you ever see a sword like that?'

We all examined it and shook our heads.
'Well, I have got it to show you, because this is what the man

who said he had seen the white people brought with him, and because
it does more or less give an air of truth to what I should otherwise

have set down as a lie. Look here; I will tell you all that
I know about the matter, which is not much. One afternoon, just

before sunset, I was sitting on the veranda, when a poor, miserable,
starved-looking man came limping up and squatted down before

me. I asked him where he came from and what he wanted, and thereon
he plunged into a long rambling narrative about how he belonged

to a tribe far in the north, and how his tribe was destroyed
by another tribe, and he with a few other survivors driven still

further north past a lake named Laga. Thence, it appears, he
made his way to another lake that lay up in the mountains, "a

lake without a bottom" he called it, and here his wife and brother
died of an infectioussickness -- probably smallpox -- whereon

the people drove him out of their villages into the wilderness,
where he wandered miserably over mountains for ten days, after

which he got into dense thorn forest, and was one day found there
by some white men who were hunting, and who took him to a place

where all the people were white and lived in stone houses. Here
he remained a week shut up in a house, till one night a man with

a white beard, whom he understood to be a "medicine-man", came
and inspected him, after which he was led off and taken through

the thorn forest to the confines of the wilderness, and given
food and this sword (at least so he said), and turned loose.'

'Well,' said Sir Henry, who had been listening with breathless
interest, 'and what did he do then?'

'Oh! he seems, according to his account, to have gone through
sufferings and hardships innumerable, and to have lived for weeks

on roots and berries, and such things as he could catch and kill.
But somehow he did live, and at last by slow degrees made his

way south and reached this place. What the details of his journey
were I never learnt, for I told him to return on the morrow,

bidding one of my headmen look after him for the night. The
headman took him away, but the poor man had the itch so badly

that the headman's wife would not have him in the hut for fear
of catching it, so he was given a blanket and told to sleep outside.

As it happened, we had a lion hanging about here just then,
and most unhappily he winded this unfortunatewanderer, and,

springing on him, bit his head almost off without the people
in the hut knowing anything about it, and there was an end of

him and his story about the white people; and whether or no there
is any truth in it is more than I can tell you. What do you