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Thenceforward, following a track, for it could not be called a road, they advanced slowly, first over a mountain pass on the farther side of which the wagon nearly upset, and then across a great bush-clad plain where there was much game and the lions roared round them at night, necessitating great fires to frighten them away.
Thus we penetrated gradually deeper and deeper into this wild country; through low mountains, over bush-clad plains, into thorn jungles, down wide valleys, over hill-divided plateaus. Late in the afternoon we would make camp. Sometimes we had good water; more often not. In the evening the throb of distant drums and snatches of intermittent wailing song rose and fell with the little night breezes.
As he pressed forward at the head of his own scanty contingent the sounds of occasional shots told him that Carlos was still maintaining a good running fight: but, as the path which he was following constituted a short cut to the spot which he desired to reach, he soon left those sounds in his rear, and, pressing rapidly forward, at length arrived at the main path; and, aided by the lightning, which was now flashing incessantly, contrived to place his men in ambush behind a number of big boulders that studded the almost perpendicular sides of the bush-clad hill, just as the leading files of the retreating party came into view round a bend of the path.
I dropped into shelter, and running with bent back got to the summit of a little bush-clad knoll. It was Colin who first caught sight of my pursuers. He was staring at a rift in the trees, and suddenly gave a short bark. I looked and saw two men, running hard, cross the grass and dip into the bed of the stream.
With slow and careful steps, his sagacious steed moved on, obedient to the rein, at one time topping the crest of a rugged hill, and then winding at a snail's pace down the steep declivity, or following the tortuous course of the streamlet through deep ravines, whose jagged and bush-clad sides frowned down upon them on either side, deepening the gloom of night.
There are the hills; and he pointed to a long range of rising ground stretching almost parallel with the course followed by the river Tana, but gradually sloping down to a dense bush-clad plain about five miles short of the house.
He pointed as he spoke to an opening ahead of us, which revealed a beautiful little lake, whose unruffled surface was studded with picturesque bush-clad islets. Water-fowl of many kinds were swimming about on its surface, or skimming swiftly over it. It seemed so peaceful that I was led to think of it as a miniature paradise.
Not bush-clad precipices, however, attracted his attention so much as the villages which nestled at their foot. In all of these he was astonished to find Christian worship maintained, though no white teacher had yet passed by that way. At daybreak on Christmas Eve he records that "three bells for morning prayers were heard from different hamlets in the neighbourhood."
On the left, or toward the east, other spurs of the range gradually lost themselves in a wide expanse of gently rolling, bush-clad plateau extending beyond the blue distance to the sea, one hundred and eighty miles away, where the Great Kei River discharges itself into the Indian Ocean.
At last we were fairly off about eleven o'clock, and an hour's easy canter, intersected by many "flat-jumps," or rather "water-jumps," across the numerous creeks, brought unto the foot of the bush-clad mountain. After that our pace became a very sober one, as the track resembled a broken rocky staircase more than a bridle-path.
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