His dues for the present were four brass wires, and as many more when we reached the palace.
I could not stand this: we were literally, as Musa said we should be, being "torn to pieces"; so I appealed to the mace-bearers, protested that Makinga could have no claims on me, as he was not a man of Usui, but a native of Utambara, and brought on a row.

On the other hand, as he could not refute this, Makinga swore the mace was all a pretence, and set a-fighting with the Wasui and all the men in turn.
To put a stop to this, I ordered a halt, and called on the district officer to assist us, on which he said he would escort us on to Suwarora's if we would stop till next morning.

This was agreed to; but in the night we were robbed of three goats, which he said he could not allow to be passed over, lest Suwarora might hear of it, and he would get into a scrape.

He pressed us strongly to stop another day whilst he sought for them, but I told him I would not, as his magic powder was weak, else he would have found the scabbard we lost long before this.
At last we got under way, and, after winding through a long forest, we emerged on the first of the populous parts of Usui, a most convulsed-looking country, of well-rounded hills composed of sandstone.
In all the parts not under cultivation they were covered with brushwood.
Here the little grass-hut villages were not fenced by a boma, but were hidden in large fields of plantains.

Cattle were numerous, kept by the Wahuma, who could not sell their milk to us because we ate fowls and a bean called maharague.
Happily no one tried to pillage us here, so on we went to Vikora's, another officer, living at N'yakasenye, under a sandstone hill, faced with a dyke of white quartz, over which leaped a small stream of water--a seventy-feet drop--which, it is said, Suwarora sometimes paid homage to when the land was oppressed by drought.