In ten minutes after that he was playing accompaniments for a full train chorus and the scared zebra and impala bolted to right and left, pursued by Tarara-boom-de-ay, Ting-a-ling-a-ling, and other non-Homeric dirges that in those days were dying an all-too-lingering death.
It was to the tune of After the Ball that the engine dipped head-foremost into a dry watercourse, and brought the train to a jaw-jarring halt.

The tune went on, and the song grew louder, for nobody was killed and the English-speaking races have a code, containing rules of conduct much more stringent than the Law of the Medes and Persians.

Somebody--probably natives from a long way off, who needed fuel to cook a meal--had chopped out the hard-wood plate on which the beams of a temporary culvert rested.

Time, white ants, gravity and luck had done the rest.

It was a case thereafter of walk or wait.
"Didn't I tell you ?" moaned Brown of Lumbwa.