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Updated: June 25, 2025
So far we go in train, I understand, towards the coast and the wild west, then we get into tongas and creep down and under jungle day after day, an immensity of trees towering above till the wholesome light of the sky is shut out and you breathe in the damp depths of the primeval jungle, and see huge mosquitoes and diminutive aboriginal men with bows and arrows hiding from you like the beasts in the field that perish.
A little after midnight, when the stars were picked out in the deep, velvet sky, Fazir Khan and the stranger, both muffled to the ears, stole beyond the street and scrambled down the perilous path-ways to the south. Towards the close of a wet afternoon two tongas discharged Lewis, George, two native servants, and a collection of gun-cases in the court-yard of the one hotel in Bardur.
The gift of a large fleet of motor ambulances presented by the cinema people at home was a great boon, for urgent cases could be transported to hospital rapidly, instead of jolting over the plain in bullock tongas. Unfortunately, the axles of these cars were not quite equal to the rough work, and in a short time they were sent away to other spheres where roads were better.
In my own behalf I could only say that I was a stranger, but, pleading all this, I knew I still deserved to be roasted, at which the chief showed a fine row of teeth and seemed pleased, but allowed me to pass on. The chief of the Tongas and his family at Caini, returning my visit, brought presents of tapa-cloth and fruits.
The night was very still, cool airs blew noiselessly from the hills, and a jackal barked hoarsely in some far-off thicket. The men hung listlessly on the gate, drinking in the cool air and watching the blue cigar smoke wreathe and fade. Suddenly down the road there came the sound of wheels. "That's a tonga," said Thwaite. "Wonder who it is." "Do tongas travel this road?" Lewis asked.
"Friends," I answered, "if you had asked me my opinion before, I should have voted for trying the mountains, beyond which, perhaps, we might find some Boers. I do not like this story of the Zulu impi. I think that someone has told them of our coming, and that it is us they mean to attack and not the Tongas, with whom they are at peace.
"For heaven's sake," I shouted. "What's here? What have we done?" "Disease!" he panted. "Disease! You know ... how the other islands... Marquesas... Solomons... Tongas... dying, all dying." His voice sank and he covered his face with his hands, shoulders shaking. "What... what is it? Who has it?"
Here the Desmonds were cheered by a reassuring telegram; and here all rested till after sundown, when the pitiless tongas claimed them again; and all night long they fled across the open desert over a track of straw, through an interminable darkness strewn with stars. Now and again a handful of these, seemingly dropped to earth, heralded a changing station, and a halt for fresh ponies.
So Lamuk drove straight with his long knife to the heart of Klok-Kutz the Stickeen. And Katchahook remembered a quarrel of the Naass River people with the Tongas of north of Dixon, and the chief of the Tongas he slew with a pistol which made much noise. And the blood-hunger gripped all the men who sat in the circle, and chief slew chief, or was slain, as chance might be.
She was, in many respects, a remarkable young woman. She had been pampered, she had been given her head; and still she was unspoiled. What the unknowing called wilfulness was simply natural independence, which she asserted whenever occasion demanded it. Tongas cut into her nerves, the stuffy gharry made her head ache, and the springless phaetons which abound in the East she avoided as the plague.
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