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Whatever cause modified the Sheikh's resolution and his anxiety to depart, Hamed's horn signal for the march was not heard that night, and on the morrow he had not gone.
By 5 P.M. we had travelled twenty miles, and the signal was sounded for a halt. At 1 A.M., the moon being up, Hamed's horn and voice were heard throughout the silent camp awaking his pagazis for the march. Evidently Sheikh Hamed was gone stark mad, otherwise why should he be so frantic for the march at such an early hour?
On the 18th the three caravans, Hamed's, Hassan's, and my own, left Tura by a road which zig-zagged towards all points through the tall matama fields. In an hour's time we had passed Tura Perro, or Western Tura, and had entered the forest again, whence the Wakimbu of Tura obtain their honey, and where they excavate deep traps for the elephants with which the forest is said to abound.
My retrospective opinion of this story for everybody tells stories in this country is, that Hamed's Marungu river more likely runs out of the Tanganyika and into the Nyassa, forming a chain of lakes, drained by the Shire river into the Zambeze; but I did not, unfortunately, argue it out with him.
The very crudeness of his embellishments invests with kind of comic relief some of his fables, which end invariably with insipid uniformity. All the pearls which have slipped through Hamed's rough hands have been valued at five hundred pounds, never more or less.
On Hamed's questioning the liberated slaves, it was discovered that Snatchblock had been right in his suspicions that the Arabs had told them, in order to induce them to escape on shore, that if captured by the white men they would be cooked and eaten.
So strenuous is his desire for one smile on the part of Fortune that Hamed's favourite topic is pearls, and of the good old days when, if a man found a patch where the grass was not too thick, he might pick up as many as a hundred shells in a day.
Vituperative power. A surprised chief. The famous Mizanza. Killing hyaenas. The Greeks and Romans of Africa. A critical moment. The "elephant's back." The wilderness of Ukimbu. End of the first stage of the search. Arrival at Unyanyembe. The 22nd of May saw Thani and Hamed's caravans united with my own at Chunyo, three and a half hours' march from Mpwapwa.
Pitying his strait for he was almost beside himself as thoughts of Kiwyeh's sultan, his extortion and rudeness, swept across his mind I advised him to run after his caravan, and tell it, as all the rest had taken the other road, to think of the Sultan of Kiwyeh. Before reaching the Kiti defile I was aware that Hamed's caravan was following us.
"Dorphy" had been wont to re-sort and classify Hamed's gleanings, for Hamed's eyes are misty; also his desire to emulate "Dorphy's" quickness was so ingenuous that in lieu of oysters he would frequently stow away flat stones and pieces of coral. Such things may be abomination in the eyes of the conscientious oyster-getter, but with Hamed they helped to fill the "beg." Vain old Arab!
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