The gum-tree forest—The blue antelope—The signal to return—An unexpected attack—Kanyemi—A night in the air—Mabunguru—Jihoue la Mkoa—Water-supplies—Arrival at Kazeh

THE COUNTRY, with its clayey soil, arid, parched and cracked by the heat, looked a wilderness. Here and there were to be seen the tracks of caravans, whitened bones of men and animals half gnawed away and scattered together in the dust. After walking for about half an hour, Dick and Joe, keeping a sharp look-out and their fingers held to the triggers of their guns, plunged into a forest of gum-trees. They did not know what they might meet with. Without being an expert shot, Joe knew how to handle a gun.

'It does you good to walk again, sir, and yet the going is none too good,' he said as he stumbled among the bits of quartz with which the ground was strewn.

Kennedy signed to his companion to be silent and to halt. They had to manage without a dog and, agile as Joe might be, he could not be expected to have the nose of a spaniel or greyhound. In the bed of a torrent where a few pools of water still stagnated a group of ten antelopes were drinking. The graceful animals seemed to scent danger and showed signs of uneasiness. After each drink they would raise their pretty heads quickly and, with their sensitive nostrils, sniff the air coming to them from their pursuers.

Kennedy skirted some trees while Joe stood motionless. When he came within range he fired. The antelopes vanished in the twinkling of an eye, but one stag fell, hit behind the shoulder, and Kennedy dashed towards his prey. It was a blaubok, a splendid animal of a pale bluish-grey, the belly and the inside of the legs pure white.

'That was a lucky shot,' cried Kennedy. 'This is a very rare species of antelope and I hope, I'll be able to preserve his skin.'

'Why, sir, how could you?'

'Why not? Look what a splendid skin.'

'But Dr Fergusson will never allow the extra weight.'

'You're right, Joe. But it's annoying to have to leave such a splendid animal like this.'

'Like this? No, we won't do that, sir. We'll get all the nourishment out of it we can, and if you'll allow me, I'll deal with it as if I was the warden of the Honourable Company of Butchers in London.'

'Go ahead, Joe, but you know, as a hunter I'm as good at eating a bit of game as at shooting it.'

'I'm quite sure of that, sir, so perhaps you'd make an oven with three stones. There's lots of dead wood, and once you get them glowing I shall only be a few minutes.'

'I won't be a minute,' Kennedy replied, and at once set about building his fire, which a few minutes later was blazing.

Joe had cut a dozen cutlets from the antelope and the tenderest pieces from the fillet, which were soon transformed into a savoury grill.

'This will please Dr Fergusson,' said the Scotsman.

'Do you know what I'm thinking about, sir?'

'The job you're doing, I expect; your grill!'

'No, sir, I'm thinking what we should look like if we couldn't find the balloon again.'

'What an idea! Are you expecting the doctor to desert us?'

'No; but supposing his anchor broke away?'

'Impossible. Besides, the doctor could easily bring his balloon down again; he's pretty good at handling her.'

'Supposing the wind carried him off and he couldn't get back to us?'

'Oh, shut up, Joe; your suppositions aren't at all amusing.'

'Well, sir, everything that happens in this world is natural, and as anything may happen, we ought to be ready for anything—'

At this moment a shot rang out.

'What's that?'said Joe.

'My carbine. I recognised its report.'

'A signal!'

'We're in danger.'

'Perhaps he is,' cried Joe.

'Come on.'

The two men quickly picked up their bag and went back the way they had come, following their own footprints. The thickness of the foliage prevented them from seeing the Victoria, which could not be far away. Then came a second shot.

'He's in a hurry,' said Joe.

'Yes. There's another.'

'It sounds to me as though he was defending himself.'

'Come on!' and they ran as fast as their legs would carry them.

When they reached the end of the wood the first thing they saw was the Victoria still in position and the doctor in the car.

'What's wrong?' asked Kennedy.

'Good God!' cried Joe.

'What is it?'

'Over there. Niggers attacking the balloon.'

Indeed, in the distance there appeared a band of about thirty men hustling one another, gesticulating, shrieking and leaping about at the foot of the sycamore. A few had climbed into the tree and were already among the highest branches. The danger seemed immediate.

'It's all up with the master,' cried Joe.

'Come, Joe, keep calm and look out. We hold the lives of four of those blackguards in our hands. Come on.' When they had run about a mile a fresh gunshot sounded from the car. It hit a tall ruffian who was swarming up the anchor-rope. A lifeless body fell from branch to branch and remained hanging twenty feet from the ground, its arms and legs dangling in the air.

'Great Scott!' said Joe, stopping. 'What's holding the fellow up?'

'What's it matter?' replied Kennedy. 'Run, man, run!'

'Oh, I see, sir,' cried Joe, bursting into a guffaw of laughter. 'It's his tail. It must be a monkey. Why, they're only monkeys after all.'

'That's worse than men,' Kennedy replied as he dashed into the middle of the shrieking band. It was a troop of pretty fearsome baboons, ferocious, cruel and horrible to look at with their dog-like snouts, but a few shots were enough for them and the grimacing horde made off, leaving several victims on the ground. In an instant Kennedy seized the ladder. Joe climbed into the sycamore and freed the anchor. The car came down to him and he got in without difficulty. A few minutes later the Victoria was rising in the air and heading eastward before a moderate wind.

'What a battle!' said Joe.

'We thought you were being attacked by natives.'

'Luckily they were only monkeys,' the doctor replied.

'From the distance there's little difference, old man.'

'Nor near to, either,' Joe replied.

'In any case,' Fergusson went on, 'the attack might have been serious. If they'd shaken the anchor loose, who knows where I might have got to?'

'What did I tell you, Mr Kennedy?'

'You were right, Joe. But in addition to being right you were also at that moment cooking some antelope steaks, and it made me hungry to watch you.'

'It would,' the doctor replied; 'antelope's flesh is delicious.'

'You can judge for yourself, sir. Dinner is served.'

It was now four o'clock in the afternoon. The Victoria ran into a stronger air-current, the ground rose imperceptibly, and soon the barometer registered a height of 1500 feet above sea-level. The doctor was forced to buoy the balloon up by a considerable expansion of the gas and the burner was working continually. About seven o'clock the Victoria was soaring over the Kanyemi basin. The doctor immediately recognised this great stretch of cultivated land, stretching for ten miles, with its villages buried among baobab and calabash-trees. It contains the residence of one of the sultans of Ugogo, where civilisation is perhaps less primitive—the people do not sell the members of their own families quite so frequently, but animals and people all live together in the round, roofless huts that look like haystacks.

After Kanyemi the country became arid and rocky, but half an hour later, in a fertile valley not far from Mdaburu, the vegetation became as vigorous as ever again. As evening came on the wind dropped and the atmosphere seemed to fall asleep. The doctor vainly tried different levels in search of a breeze, and when he saw the whole of Nature at rest he decided to spend the night in the air and, as a precaution, rose about a thousand feet. The Victoria hung motionless. The night, splendid with stars, came down in silence.

Dick and Joe stretched themselves out on their peaceful couches and slept soundly during the doctor's watch. At midnight he was relieved by the Scotsman.

'If anything in the slightest degree unusual happens, wake me,' he said; 'and, above all, don't take your eyes off the barometer. It's our compass.'

The night was cold, the temperature being nearly 27 degrees lower than the previous day. The darkness awoke the nightly concert of the animals, driven from their lairs by hunger and thirst; the soprano of the frogs mingling with the howls of the jackals, while the sonorous bass of the lions provided a foundation to the harmonies of this living orchestra.

When he returned to his post in the morning, Doctor Fergusson consulted his compass and noticed that the wind had shifted during the night. The Victoria had drifted some thirty miles to the north-eastward during the last two hours or so. She was now passing over Mabunguru, a rocky district strewn with boulders of beautifully polished cyanite, and broken by rocks shaped like a camel's hump. Conical tors, like the rocks of Karnak, stood out of the ground like Druidical dolmens; many bones of elephants and buffaloes lay bleaching here and there. The trees were few, apart from some dense woods to eastward, which sheltered occasional villages.

About seven o'clock, a circular rock appeared, about two miles across, and shaped like an enormous turtle-shell.

'We're on the right track,' said the doctor; 'there's Jihoue la Mkoa, where we're going to halt for a few minutes. I want to get a fresh supply of water for my furnace. Let's look for somewhere to anchor.'

'There aren't many trees about,' Kennedy replied.

'Let's try, anyhow,' said Joe; 'over with the anchors.'

Gradually losing her lift, the balloon slowly neared the ground. The anchor-ropes ran out and one anchor caught a fissure in the rock, bringing the Victoria to a standstill. It must not be imagined that the doctor could completely extinguish his burner during a halt. The equilibrium of the balloon had been calculated at sea-level, but the country had been continually rising, and at a height of six or seven hundred feet the balloon would have had a tendency to drop to a lower level than that of the ground. It was therefore necessary to maintain a certain expansion of the gas. Only in an absolute calm would the doctor have allowed the car to rest on the ground, in which case the balloon, relieved of a considerable weight, would have kept in the air without the help of the burner.

The maps showed immense lakes on the western slopes of the Jihoue la Mkoa. Joe set off alone with a cask that would hold about ten gallons and had no difficulty in finding the place he wanted, not far from a little deserted village, where he filled his cask and was back again in less than three-quarters of an hour. He had seen nothing of special interest except, perhaps, the huge footprints of an elephant; he even nearly fell into one of these in which a half-eaten carcass was lying. But he brought back a kind of medlar which the monkeys were earing greedily. The doctor identified it as the fruit of the 'mhenbu,' a tree growing in great abundance in the eastern part of Jihoue la Mkoa. Fergusson was waiting for Joe with a certain amount of impatience, for even a short stay in these inhospitable regions always filled him with anxiety. The water was shipped without difficulty, for the car was almost on a level with the ground. Joe then loosed the anchor and climbed nimbly up to his master's side. The latter at once increased the flame and the Victoria resumed her voyage through the air.

She was at this time about a hundred miles from Kazeh, an important settlement in the African interior, which, thanks to a breeze from the southeast, the travellers had hopes of making in the course of the day. They were travelling at about fourteen miles per hour. The handling of the balloon became somewhat difficult. It was impossible to rise without a big expan- sion of the gas, for the level of the country was, on the average, about three thousand feet. As the doctor preferred, so far as was possible, not to force the expansion, he followed very skilfully the windings of a fairly rapid slope and skimmed over the villages of Thembo and Tura Wels. The latter forms part of Unyamwezi, a magnificent country where the trees attain enormous dimensions, especially the cactus which is gigantic.

About two o'clock, in splendid weather and under a burning sun which stifled the slightest breath of air, the Victoria was hovering over the town of Kazeh, about three hundred and fifty miles from the coast.

'We left Zanzibar at nine in the morning,' said the doctor, consulting his notes, 'and in two days our circuitous route has brought us nearly five hundred geographical miles. Burton and Speke took four and a half months to do the same distance.' Q5ziDzEjwFJetXawTI9nl3hiToyIZvpLbyK7HEkNWorp6LhkVkbFxctUHdhNHLWa