But in the end they learned to handle their rifles sufficiently well to supply the camp.

Moreover, day by day little parties of the slaves disappeared, I presume to seek their own homes, so that when at last we entered the borders of the Mazitu country there were not more than fifty of them left, including seventeen of those whom we had taught to shoot.
Then it was that our real adventures began.
One evening, after three days' march through some difficult bush in which lions carried off a slave woman, killed one of the donkeys and mauled another so badly that it had to be shot, we found ourselves upon the edge of a great grassy plateau that, according to my aneroid, was 1,640 feet above sea level.
"What place is this ?" I asked of the two Mazitu guides, those same men whom we had borrowed from Hassan.
"The land of our people, Chief," they answered, "which is bordered on one side by the bush and on the other by the great lake where live the Pongo wizards." I looked about me at the bare uplands that already were beginning to turn brown, on which nothing was visible save vast herds of buck such as were common further south.

A dreary prospect it was, for a slight rain was falling, accompanied by mist and a cold wind.
"I do not see your people or their kraals," I said; "I only see grass and wild game." "Our people will come," they replied, rather nervously.

"No doubt even now their spies watch us from among the tall grass or out of some hole." "The deuce they do," I said, or something like it, and thought no more of the matter.

When one is in conditions in which anything _may_ happen, such as, so far as I am concerned, have prevailed through most of my life, one grows a little careless as to what _will_ happen.