Still the ride did us good and shook up our livers, and by the time we turned for home I was feeling more like a white man.
We jogged back in the short winter twilight, past the wooded grounds of white villas, held up every few minutes by transport-wagons and companies of soldiers.

The rain had come on in real earnest, and it was two very bedraggled horsemen that crawled along the muddy lanes.
As we passed one villa, shut in by a high white wall, a pleasant smell of wood smoke was wafted towards us, which made me sick for the burning veld.

My ear, too, caught the twanging of a zither, which somehow reminded me of the afternoon in Kuprasso's garden-house.
I pulled up and proposed to investigate, but Blenkiron very testily declined.
'Zithers are as common here as fleas,' he said.

'You don't want to be fossicking around somebody's stables and find a horse-boy entertaining his friends.

They don't like visitors in this country; and you'll be asking for trouble if you go inside those walls.