*chapter Xviii*

*FIVE YEARS LATER*

Roger Brentham has now lived consecutively for five years in the Happy Valley; or, to be accurate, at Magara, in a natural fortress looking down on it from the Iraku escarpment. Much of his work, however, lies in the plains below, and he has a comfortable rest-house near the Stotts’ station—but not too near, for Kaya la Balalo[#]—as they have named it—is now the centre of a considerable native village, a little too noisy, dusty, and smelly for fastidious nerves and noses.

[#] “The City of God.”

In these five years a great transformation has taken place in and around the Happy Valley. A land settlement has been come to with the natives and is duly laid down in a rough survey and in signed documents drawn up in German and Swahili. The native villages, plantations, pasture ground and reserves are clearly defined so that they may be placed outside the scope of white encroachment; but in coming to this agreement, some common-sense regard has been had for highly mineralized land not already inhabited and suitable for profitable exploitation (with a share of the profits going to the native community) and for the location of European settlements, farms, mission stations, laboratories and experimental plantations. In short, both parties are satisfied. There is sufficient security for the investment of much white capital in this region of undeveloped wealth; and the Negroes are reassured regarding their homes and future prospects of expansion. They have been shrewd bargainers and have had the Stotts as their advocates. The news of their fair and even generous treatment has attracted considerable native immigration, especially from the Nyamwezi countries; Brentham’s Wa-nyamwezi porters have been useful recruiting agents, and the district is well off for labour. The native chiefs administer rough justice as between native and native. Brentham and three of his German colleagues, as well as Mr. Ewart Stott, hold commissions from the German Government as justices of the peace, and there is a German commandant at a central post in the Irangi country who presides over a Court of Appeal from their decisions. But as a rule, these Concessionaires having originally inspired confidence in von Wissmann’s mind during his great pacification of German East Africa are left pretty free to administer the area of their large Concession and to keep order within its limits. This, with the cordial co-operation of the native chiefs they find comparatively easy, and in this the friendship between Roger and the outlying Masai tribes, who have not forgotten the blood-brotherhood of 1888 has been very useful. The Happy Valley has nothing to fear from Masai raids and has at present no outside enemies.

Lucy and Maud joined Roger in the spring of 1892 and after four years’ happy life in this curiously secluded region—so cut off as it was from African troubles, from wars between Arabs and Europeans raids of tribe upon tribe, risings against the Germans, squabbles with British pioneers—are now preparing to return to England. Lucy has had two more children one born in 1893 and the other in 1895. She is anxious to take them both home and place them in safety there; at the same time she hungers for a sight of the older two whom she has not seen for over four years. She is in fact a prey to that divided allegiance which has so often marred the happiness of the wives of men engaged in Indian or African work: a desire to be with their husbands, and yet an anxiety about the health and bringing-up of their children in a barbaric environment. The Stotts consider they have solved this question by parting with their oldest child and letting their other children run the African risks and grow up—if they survive—with only an African outlook. They are true colonists in intention. But settlers like the Brenthams always envisage an eventual retreat to the home country and an English education for their children.

They are assembled on the open ground beyond the garden of their house in Iraku, to take leave of their German associates in the Concession: Herr Treuherz Hildebrandt (whose sentimental fore-name is usually disguised under the initial T) and Dr. Wolfgang Wiese. Hildebrandt is the mining engineer who is ascertaining the mineral wealth of the mountain region bordering on the Happy Valley; Dr. Wiese, besides being in case of need the physician and surgeon of the little European community, is a very clever analytical chemist, botanist, zoologist and horticulturist, one of those all-round men that Germany so often produced before the war and so often contributed in still earlier days to the opening up of the British Empire. He has arrived in haste from his dwelling a mile distant to bid farewell to the gracious Mrs. Brentham. Wiese is spectacled and bearded, a little shy in manner with strangers, and inclined to melancholy when his thoughts turn to the young wife who accompanied him to Africa about the time that Lucy and Maud came out to join husband and brother. Less fortunate than they, she had died from an attack of coast fever. Thereafter he had found some mitigation of his loneliness in the pleasant home created by Lucy and Maud, so that he regards them with affection and thinks they must be the very best type of British women. As, however, he has work in progress at his laboratory of crucial importance, his farewells are prompt and soon concluded.

But his colleague, the mining engineer Hildebrandt, stays longer, being very loath to part with Maud Brentham. He is tall, passably handsome, soldierly, well-knit, a lint-white blond with violet-grey eyes like Lucy’s. Though he comes from Saxony he is more of the Friesland type, in the contrast between his straw-yellow hair (mostly shaved to stubble, it is true) and his dark-grey eyes. He has the further attraction to which many women would succumb in being very musical (out of business hours). In those days before gramophones he was a welcome guest for the music which welled up in his brain and poured from his fingers. Roger had managed with infinite difficulty to import and carry up on an ox-cart a cottage piano of German make, and on this instrument Hildebrandt would waft his listeners to other scenes—of far away and long ago—with his waltzes, sonatas, minuets, marches, and songs without words, sometimes playing by ear with that wonderful musician’s memory; sometimes, when he took things seriously, from the enormous supply of printed music which a sympathetic company had allowed him to carry up-country.

A year after their first meeting he had proposed to Maud, and had renewed this offer of marriage on two other occasions. But she had been firm in her refusal, though she appreciated his good looks and frank manliness, and almost loved him for his music. But she declared the difference in their ages—twelve years—was an insuperable objection; secondly she did not wish to marry, so that she might always live with Roger and Lucy and their children. If they failed her she would make a career of her own—become a New Woman and agitate for women’s rights. “On top of all that, nothing would induce me to live in Germany, though I’ve no doubt you are in the right, and it’s the finest country in the world. But I’m so interested in watching English developments. When we have finished with Africa and made our pile we’re going to settle at home and improve our own country.”

“Well then, if you’ll marry me, I’ll go and live in England with you…”

But Maud has remained obdurate. In spite of this they have settled down in course of time, and in battling together against the anxieties, difficulties, and dangers of African colonization, into very good comrades. Maud and Roger and even Lucy all speak German to some extent, and the Germans of the Concession have an even greater facility in English. Conversation is often a medley of both languages and much laughter at each other’s mistakes. Lucy contributes to the common stock of entertainment very little in the way of talent. She is naturally fond of music: sweet melodies, deep harmonies bring the tears into her eyes; gay tunes make her want to dance; but she is no musician and no dancer. Maud has a pleasant contralto voice and is a good accompanist. Lucy’s water-colour painting has long since been given up as a futility in this age of universal talent. But she makes botanical collections now with some deftness and ability under the instruction of Dr. Wiese, whom in this direction she really helps. Yet considering she has borne four healthy children in six years of marriage no one can ask much from her in the way of accomplishment in the arts; and by the time she has attended to her offspring’s needs with the perfunctory help of Halima—herself saddled with two brown hybrids, bearing extravagant Portuguese names—mended their clothes and her husband’s, and her own, and generally directed the housekeeping, it is felt she has done her duty to the little community. Nevertheless though she is not particularly witty, original, or wise, and has no great physical attraction for any one but her husband, and is prone at times to be silent with a gentle melancholy, she has an inherent gift for making people feel at home. She has a capacity for listening unweariedly to the longest stories, and is a sympathetic confidant to any one in trouble.

So Bergwerksingenieur Hildebrandt said good-bye to her with nearly as much sentiment as infused his voice and his hand-grip when he took leave of his liebste Kamerad, “Meess Mowd” (Maud always said that his pronunciation of her name robbed his courtship of all romance). He looks indeed so sad at parting from these two dear Englishwomen that Maud is nearly tempted to kiss him; only that he might have misconstrued her motherliness.

The two children in the early morning—it is just after sunrise—are laughing and crowing with the excitement of the forming safari and the coming start. The three-year-old boy, Ambrose, is named after his grandfather; the baby girl has been called Sibyl at her mother’s request. In all probability Lucy had never even so much as suspected that there was more than cousinly affection between her husband and Lady Silchester: it would have taken something like ocular evidence to make her doubt Roger’s fidelity. At first Sibyl had frightened and humbled her, but during the last year of their association, at Engledene, she had been coolly kind and had shown something like gratitude for Lucy’s care of her ugly fretful little boy. Before Lucy had left to rejoin her husband in East Africa, Sibyl had said: “I expect you’ll have a lot more children. If you have another girl, call it by my name. I should like to be associated with a child of Roger’s. Promise? Very well then: in return I’ll give an eye to little John and fat Maud whilst you are in Africa. Indeed I cannot see why they shouldn’t move over here from Aldermaston, when your own people get tired of them; and share Clithy’s nursery… At any rate come here on visits, and if they quarrel it will do Clithy a world of good. His nurses give him too much sense of his own importance.”

So there was at least this pleasant thing for them to look forward to, even though Lucy’s eyes were wet with tears at leaving Iraku. Engledene Lodge as well as Church Farm would be open to them. Sibyl, more ambitious than ever of cutting a dash, playing a part in modern history, rivalling Lady Feenix, revenging herself for snubs by the Brinsley clan, lived much in London and gave up Engledene to the quiet bringing-up of her only child. When she went down there it was to rest and repair her beauty, to transact humdrum estate business with Maurice Brentham. Except for the autumn shooting parties she entertained very little at Engledene. It was in Scotland and above all in London that she played the lavish hostess and sought to undermine Cabinets and bring a new recruit to the Opposition.

She was now thirty-four, and when animated only looked twenty-six. Rumour had assigned her several love affairs, which out of England—on the Riviera, at Paris, at Rome—were said to have been carried to the borders of indiscretion. It had even been announced that “a marriage had been arranged and would shortly take place,” etc., between Lady Silchester and Sir Elijah Tooley—but the announcement had been promptly contradicted, and a month after occurred the first resounding crack in the Tooley edifice…

It was curious how her personality projected itself across five thousand miles of land and sea into Equatorial Africa; so that Lucy and perhaps Roger should both have been thinking about her as they were preparing to leave their home in this secluded region. Lucy thought of Sibyl pleasantly as of one she no longer feared because she never desired to cross her path as a rival, or contest her superiority. Sibyl would offer her a temporary home in her home country where her children could be riotously happy, and where Roger—even—might be tempted to join her for a few months before resuming his strenuous life as a conqueror of the wilderness. Roger had held out this hope to alleviate the sadness of their approaching separation.

He was to accompany his wife and sister as far as Burungi; after which he must return to the Iraku Hills to take full advantage of the dry-season months for great projected developments of the planting and mining industries. From Burungi, now quite an important centre of traffic, whence well-made roads proceed coastwards, with rest-houses every twenty miles, Lucy and Maud and the precious children would be escorted to the coast port of their embarkation by the two German sergeants, whose service Brentham has taken over from the Stotts. Their journey might be broken by a few days’ rest at Hangodi in the Nguru country. Maud would like to see the scene of the tragedy and of Lucy’s induction into African life. Lucy would like to pay a visit of sentiment to John Baines’s grave and to live over again in a sense of contrite reminiscence her brief experiences as a missionary’s wife. She wants to put herself back in time to where the outlook seemed hopeless, and realize the wide horizon of happiness which now seems open before her.

So—an hour late, with all these last thoughts, musing reflections and leave-takings—Halima is howling with grief because she must remain behind—the caravan starts on its first day’s march. Lucy from delicacy of constitution is unable to ride much, so she travels in a machila with her baby. Maud bestrides a Maskat donkey and hopes when she returns they will by that time have got horses safely through the tsetse belt, into interior transport … “you have so little initiative on a donkey, it will never do anything unconventional.” Ambrose being thought too young to ride a donkey is handed over to his special guardian and chum, a tall Manyamwezi porter who hoists him on to his broad shoulders. From this elevation of six feet he surveys the landscape as the safari swings along. Some German friend had given him the previous Christmas a tin trumpet, and with blasts of this and shouts of glee he hails the sight of game standing at gaze in the distance.

This would have annoyed any sportsman of the caravan had they been bent on killing for the pot or the trophy; but his father lets him do this unrebuked. He is not intending to transgress his own by-laws about game preservation, and the caravan in these bountiful days has its food supply ensured from station to station. Still Roger reflects musingly as he rides up hill and down hill through the breadth of the Happy Valley and up to the low ridge and water-partings which mark its limit and the commencement of the long descent through Irangi, that in one respect the glamour of the Happy Valley has already withered under the practical need for developing its resources. Though there has been no deliberate big-game slaughter in hecatombs as on the British side of the frontier, the Grant’s gazelles, the hartebeests and tsesebes, the elands, zebra, and impala are never to be seen now grazing near the road. They are retreating every year farther into the unprofitable wastes away from the well-beaten tracks, noisy with the coming and going of carriers, soldiers, native traders, or ivory hunters. These last, under some degree of control, are even being encouraged to pursue the elephants into the recesses of the hills and forests of the north; not only to bring down as much ivory as possible, to sell, but because the elephant has met civilization too abruptly. He has contemptuously knocked down the laboriously erected telegraph posts, and has snapped and tangled-up the copper wire. This in its derelict condition is too sore a temptation to the native accustomed to regard copper wire as a decorative article of the highest value … so many cubits of copper wire would buy a wife. So an edict has gone forth which Roger himself could not protest against, that between Burungi and Kondoa any one, native or European, may kill as many elephants as he pleases. The native herdsmen, again, whom they pass on the road lazily minding the cattle, sheep and goats, are no longer in the state of Paradisiac nudity that characterized them on that first journey of Roger and Lucy down the Happy Valley. No one has remonstrated with them on their nakedness: a hint from Dame Fashion has been enough. The white men and the white men’s black followers have been clothed, so they too must wear old uniforms, old coats, old trousers, something in the way of frowsy coverings of their bronze bodies.

The vulgarization of Africa has begun. Never again will there be seen in this region a condition of unspoilt Nature as it first showed itself to the Brenthams. But as a set-off Roger draws Lucy’s attention to the telegraph line in course of re-erection, after the rude elephantine protests. It is proceeding to a great German military post, but a branch will presently be carried to Iraku—almost as soon as she is back in Berkshire—and then he and she will be in close touch. It will be possible, at a cost of a few pounds, to telegraph to one another and receive the answer in a day—two days at most.

It is four years since the Brenthams saw Burungi, for Roger’s journeys, meantime, have ranged farther and farther afield towards the mysterious—still mysterious—region between the Happy Valley and the shores of the Victoria Nyanza. Even then, when Roger rode there to meet his wife and Maud on their journey inland—Maud’s first introduction to Real Africa—the desolate Burungi of 1888 was no longer recognizable, with its wilderness of thorn bushes and baobabs on which gorged vultures were perching, its lurking lions and hyenas, as the evening darkened, its flitting, furtive, thievish Wagogo, the ruined station of the Stotts, and no other visible sign of habitation. Even four years ago, though the vultures were still there, it was to feed on the offal of a well-supplied market-place, the thorn bushes had been burnt for firewood or cut up for fences, and a corrugated iron hut on the Stotts’ site, though villainously hot in sunshine, provided shelter and security for stores. Now there were brick houses and a number of grass huts on the Mission enclosure near the river. There were half-finished Government buildings in course of erection and many tents for the accommodation of a staff of military officials and constantly saluting white civilians. A number of clothed Wagogo, looking singularly mean in their garments—though without them they were lithe and graceful savages—were, under the raucous directions of a white engineer-sergeant, laying down a light Decauville railway.

All these activities had not for the time being made Burungi less ugly, and Roger hated the sight of the place. After a long conference with the two civil-spoken German sergeants, who a year previously had been truly thankful to exchange the military career for employment under his Company, he went through the agony of good-bye—an agony he would not protract by spending the night in this noisy, discomfortable place. He compressed his embraces of wife and children—the latter mystified and yowling with the dim realization of bereavement—his wringing of Maud’s hands, his directions to telegraph at every opportunity till they got on board, and hang the cost—into two hours; after which, though only two more hours of daylight remained, he rode away, back to their camp of the previous night: knowing that further lingering might end in his deciding to accompany these two dear women and prattling babes all the way to the coast and perhaps all the way to England.

And it was essential to their future welfare that he should stay where he was and not claim a holiday till certain results had been achieved and certain proofs of easily exploited wealth had been obtained.

But it was a melancholy Roger who, six days afterwards, rode back into the lovely amphitheatre in the Iraku hills where he had made his home. His Maskat donkey showed signs of having being hard ridden; his carriers averred that Master, ordinarily so considerate of their fatigue, so jolly on the line of march, had spurred them on remorselessly, had seemed to pass wakeful nights and had eaten his camp meals with poor appetite. Roger himself felt a few more partings like this would make his earthly life unbearable. Oh that there were some truth in the silly hymn chorus that the Stotts delighted in making their pupils sing: “Here we meet to part no more, part no more, part no more!” He should have been firm with Lucy and bade her stay till he himself was ready to go. And yet when would he be ready to go, with Phantom Fortune always beckoning yet never disclosing the final hoard?

There was something in Lucy’s face which restrained him from insisting that she should stay. Dr. Wiese had hinted at a growing anaemia which should be checked. Her dominating feeling was a fear that she might lose the precious children born to her here in the wilderness and be forgotten by those she had left behind. He must not take the thing too tragically. If Hildebrandt continued to get these satisfactory assays and could trace the gold-bearing reef a sufficient distance towards the western limit of the Concession; or if on the other hand he could find the matrix of the diamonds, and not merely these minute brilliants in the gravel of the mountain streams, their main doubts and difficulties would be relieved and he could depart for a holiday at home.

The return to his house was some alleviation of his bereavement. It was so associated with the presence of wife and sister and of his babies. The afternoon sun was behind him; it would soon drop below the blue mountain wall which was a rampart of protection to the site he had chosen for his European settlement. How often he and Lucy had stood here in blue shadow and looked towards the sun-flooded east beyond the shade of the escarpment, towards the Happy Valley! This was just such a close to the day as they had loved to witness three hundred days out of the three hundred and sixty-five of the year. To the north stretched the lake of cobalt blue, with its irregular blush-tinted rim of flamingo hosts. South-east of the lake beyond lush swamps and green plantations, were the Umbugwe villages and the Stotts’ large station—little points, clusters, and pencils of brown and white. The whitest speck was the Stotts’ new Chapel. He had been present at its opening ceremony a month ago—to gratify Mrs. Stott. Beyond lake and villages were the gathering masses of mighty mountains, ending north-eastwards in the snow-tipped pyramid of Meru—on this clear evening—in the supernatural snowy dome of Kibo. What a prospect! And yet he would willingly exchange for it the view over southern Berkshire from the down of Farleigh Wallop.

He entered his house. The presence of Lucy and Maud seemed as if it must be material, no: merely spiritual. He looked into their rooms. They had been considerately tidied before they left, and showed little sign of packing up and departure. Lucy was a good house-wife, he reflected, and she probably judged that in her absence he might want to entertain guests, colleagues come on business, Government officials. So that her room and his sister’s were ready prepared for occupation. The nursery was a little more desolate. The toys had been given away to Halima’s children. If ever Ambrose and Sibyl came back—and how unlikely that they would!—they would have grown far beyond the love of toys. Maud had left most of her songs on the top of the piano. She could get newer ones in England. The vases were filled with fresh flowers from bush and garden. Halima had put them there, faithful to her mistress’s directions.

Halima now called him to his tea, on the verandah. The table was laid with all the care that Lucy was wont to bestow on it. Andrade the cook had baked a nice cake and even attempted something resembling a muffin—a kind of compromise between a muffin and a tea cake, due to a confounding of Maud’s instructions. Roger’s eyes filled with tears. Halima, departing with a brass tray, answered with two loud sobs in her facile grief. Yet a few years before she had been ready to abandon her mistress in distress when she was stranded in Mr. Callaway’s unsavoury depot at Unguja. His eyes followed her portly form magnificently swathed in red Indian cottons, with tolerant good will. There was a good deal of the humbug about all these black people, but it was kindly humbug. He was grateful for this comprehension of his sorrow, for this effort to carry out his wife’s instructions that the comforts and little elegancies of their home should be continued after her absence.

Then the tame Crowned cranes came below the verandah to be fed with bread and cake as Maud had encouraged them to do. His black-and-tan English terrier, confined for safety in the cook’s quarters during his absence, had been released and now came tearing up the steps and rushing along the verandah till it was in contact with his lowered hand, volleying forth a long succession of eager barks of joy and whimpers of hysterical distress and relief at Master’s absence and return…

In the evening after dinner Wiese, Hildebrandt and Riemer (Plantation Manager) came up to pay their respects to the Herr Direktor and give him an informal report of all that had occurred during his absence. They tactfully said little about his bereavement, though Hildebrandt heaved some theatrical sighs at the sight of Maud’s music on the piano. But they had much to say in German and English that was interesting and encouraging. So they sat up late into the night talking and discussing. Andrade sent them up an impromptu supper, wine and beer were drunk in the moderation imposed by their then rarity—owing to transport difficulties—and when they finally departed at one in the morning, under the firmament of blazing stars, with lemon-yellow lanterns to light their path back to their respective quarters, the grass-widower betook himself to his couch in a more resigned frame of mind. There would be great doings, great strokes to hew out fortunes for all of them, within the next few months.

A fortnight afterwards, by swift runner from Kondoa, came a telegraphic message despatched from Saadani:

Arrived here safely. Leave for Unguja to-morrow. God bless you.—LUCY MAUD.

Thereafter followed long day-rides of inspection, an occasional week’s absence from home studying possibilities in remote parts of the Concession, holding conferences with the Stotts, laying cases and possibilities of special difficulty before the German officer commanding at Kondoa. His talks with the Stotts were directed to several ends: urging the Stotts to get into the confidence of all the native tribes—Bantu, Hamitic, Nilotic—of the Concession’s area and find out how far their interests might be subserved by the full exploitation of the animal, vegetable and mineral wealth of this patch of East Africa. “Unless we carry the natives with us,” he would say, “this enterprise must eventually fail, wither up; because, boast of the climate as we may, the hard manual labour cannot be performed by white men: we must fall back on the native. Now half the men-natives in these parts are picturesque to look at, graceful figure and all that; but they shirk hard work. They prefer to loll about in the sun or to run after women. Can’t you put some ambition into ’em? Teach them something besides these rotten hymns and prayers that are meaningless to them?”

“But we do,” said Mrs. Stott. “You haven’t looked over our school for two years, I believe. You seem to have got hymn-singing on the brain. Our hymns translated by us are not rubbish and the natives enjoy singing them…”

“I don’t doubt they do, though I don’t see what use it is. Neither they nor the prayers prevent the Almighty from sending the flights of locusts… Or rather these appeals and this excessive praise do not stimulate the Divine power to do something to abate Africa’s myriad plagues. It is always poor Man—and most of all, poor White man—who has to work his brain and body to exhaustion to set right what Nature perversely sets wrong. Here am I, trying to abate the grasshopper plague in our tobacco plantations by encouraging the domestication of the Crowned crane. Yet the natives won’t take any interest in this idea, though the Crowned cranes feed themselves and have charming manners. Can’t you push this matter in your schools? Couldn’t you preach a sermon on the uses of the Crowned crane?”

On another occasion he put a further difficulty before the Ewart Stotts. “Look here! I’m going to take you again into my confidence. I want you to find me an assistant, some one of your own kin in Australia who would come out here at short notice on an agreement for three years—I even want two men, one of them versed in shorthand and typewriting who could be my secretary. I don’t know any one in England who isn’t either a rotter or a potential rotter, or hasn’t got a job already. There’s my brother Geoffrey, but he’s a Commander now in the Navy, getting on fine, and simply wouldn’t think of chucking the service to come here. My other brother is well suited as a land-agent. I want something Australian, some one as like you two as possible. I don’t mind a moderate amount of religion, as long as it doesn’t waste their time on week-days, and they can’t be too teetotal for my liking. No Whisky-drinker need apply.”

“Why, I believe we know of the very two, at any rate of the principal one,” said Mrs. Stott: “My nephew Phil Ewart. I haven’t seen him since he was a baby, but my brother’s wife writes to me now and again and says he’s doing very well on a big sheep run in Queensland…”

“Well then, look here: let’s draft a cablegram that I can send off from the coast. I’ll guarantee him a year’s salary and, if he turns out satisfactory, a three years’ agreement—L500 a year. He can choose any likely young fellow … good character … abstainer … serve as clerk … L200 a year commence … take steamer Australia-Durban, and German steamer Durban-Saadani, and so on, up-country. If I get ’em here by November I can give em three months’ trial before I set out for home… Must take a holiday next year and bring my wife out afterwards. Don’t like to leave this business without a Britisher in it to watch my interests, don’t you know, and advise me how things are going while I am away.”

So they arranged the matter between them. Then Mrs. Stott said: “I’ve a funny proposition to make. A week ago I received a letter from Ann Jamblin that was … at Hangodi… Ann Anderson she is now. She saw Lucy there five weeks ago and was much touched at her calling on them. Says she took a special fancy to your dear, sweet, pretty children. Her own little girl is very ailing. Well, now she goes on to say old Mrs. Doland, who was a great supporter of their Mission, has died and only left the East African Mission L5,000. For this and other reasons the Mission thinks of giving up Hangodi, as it is quite an isolated station now, and all their others are in the British Sphere… Well, to put it quite plain, as you’re impatient to be gone—oh, I know by the way you’re tapping your gaiters—how would it be if your Concession or you or some one advanced our Mission L150 for out-of-pocket expenses—so as to move quickly, don’t you know? And we sent word to Ann and her husband to join us as soon as they had definite authority to evacuate Hangodi. The German Government, I believe, are going to buy the station. If we got Ann and her husband up here the couple of them would strengthen our hands mightily and then we could give some of that worldly instruction you’re so anxious about. Or make it up in some way of help. Strengthen the British element here. For although I don’t hold with your views about Providence one little bit, and believe the World was made in six days and am surprised every now and again that you aren’t struck down for your audacity, not to say blasphemy, yet something tells me you and we are really working for the same Divine ends…”

Roger said the matter should certainly have his attention. (Before he left for England the following Spring Ann and Eb were members of the Stott Mission, and the Stotts were able to open another station and school in the Iraku country.)

The months flew by through autumn, winter and spring. Roger established a stud farm in the Happy Valley where he could locate a captured dozen of zebra and interbreed with Maska donkeys … perhaps a manageable, large-bodied zebra-mule might solve some of their transport difficulties in the regions of the tse-tse fly. He introduced shorthorn cattle from South Africa to mingle with the native oxen and improve the milk supply. He imported from Natal six Basuto ponies, two stallions and four mares. He ordered three safety bicycles—the great new invention or combination of inventions. He and his German engineers, reinforced by a clever Swiss sent out by the German directorate, gave special consideration to the waterfalls of Iraku, to harness them to turbines and produce electric light. This power would feed electric dynamos when the progress of the railway construction enabled such heavy things to reach the Happy Valley. They laid out great coffee plantations and experimented in tea and quinine. It was hoped the natives might take up all these cultures in time, on their own account, as they had done that of cacao on the Gold Coast and in the German Cameroons.

The day for his departure in the early spring came ever nearer and nearer. The two Australians arrived, went down with fever, recovered and eventually proved the right stuff, especially young Philip Ewart. Mrs. Stott said she would see he did not get into mischief while the Director was absent in England. She would also give an eye to the Brenthams’ house and the doings of Andrade and Halima as caretakers.

There was therefore little cause for anxiety on Roger’s part as he made his preparations for a six-months’ absence, save the rumoured doings of a certain Stolzenberg, a mysterious German hunter who, coming from the British Sphere, had established himself near the north-west escarpment of Lake Manyara, apparently on the border of the Happy Valley Concession (Gluecklichesthals Konzession).