There's not enough powder left to make a blue devil." "Well," I replied, with the kind of joke one perpetrates under such circumstances, "we shall have plenty of blue devils without making any more." Truly ours was a dreadful situation.

Let the reader imagine it.

Within a little more than forty-eight hours we were to be shot to death with arrows if an erratic old gentleman who, for aught I knew might be dead, did not turn up at what was then one of the remotest and most inaccessible spots in Central Africa.

Moreover, our only hope that such a thing would happen, if hope it could be called, was the prophecy of a Kaffir witch-doctor.
To rely on this in any way was so absurd that I gave up thinking of it and set my mind to considering if there were any possible means of escape.

After hours of reflection I could find none.