If you only make a mile or two the first day you have at least done better than stand still; loads have been apportioned and porters broken in to some extent; you have broken the spell of inertia, and hereafter there is less likely to be trouble.

We made up our minds to get away that afternoon, and I was sent back to the hotel to find Brown, who had gone for his belongings.
If Brown had stayed sober all might have been well, but his headache and feeling of unworthiness had been too much for him and I found him with a straw in the neck of a bottle of whisky alternately laying down law to Georges Coutlass and drinking himself into a state of temporary bliss.
"You Greeks dunno nothin'!" he asserted as I came in.

"You never did know nothin', an' you're never goin' to know nothin'! 'Cause why?
'I'll tell you.

Simply because I am goin' to tell! I'm mum, I am! When s'mother gents an' me 'ave business, that's our business--see! None o' your business--'ss our business, an' I'm not goin' to tell you Greeks nothin' about where we're off to, nor why, nor when.

An' you put that in your pipe an' smoke it!" I sat in the dining-room for a while, hoping that the Greek would go away; but as Brown was fast drinking himself into a condition when he could not have been moved except on stretcher, and was momentarily edging closer to an admission of all he knew or guessed about our intention, I took the bull by the horns at last--snatched away his whisky bottle, and walked off with it.
He came after me swearing like a trooper, and his own porters, who had been waiting for more than an hour beside his loads, trailed along after him.