He kept his horse at an easy walk, and talked to me as if we were two friends out for a trip together.
Perhaps he had talked thus to Arcoll, the half-caste who drove his Cape-cart.
The wooded bluff above Machudi's glen showed far in front.

He told me the story of the Machudi war, which I knew already, but he told it as a saga.

There had been a stratagem by which one of the Boer leaders--a Grobelaar, I think--got some of his men into the enemy's camp by hiding them in a captured forage wagon.
'Like the Trojan horse,' I said involuntarily.
'Yes,' said my companion, 'the same old device,' and to my amazement he quoted some lines of Virgil.
'Do you understand Latin ?' he asked.
I told him that I had some slight knowledge of the tongue, acquired at the university of Edinburgh.

Laputa nodded.

He mentioned the name of a professor there, and commented on his scholarship.
'O man!' I cried, 'what in God's name are you doing in this business?
You that are educated and have seen the world, what makes you try to put the clock back?
You want to wipe out the civilization of a thousand years, and turn us all into savages.