We also had to get up and go away, but not for the same purpose. If we had not gone away and laughed, we should have had a fit or burst a blood-vessel. It was altogether too rich. _We_ returned red-eyed and weary also, and I believe that the old gentlemen thought that we had been up to the same performance as themselves, though they could not understand how I resumed my cigar on my reappearance, and continued smoking with unruffled serenity. I made a point of finishing my smoke to the last half-inch, and all through the “shaurie” that succeeded I became aware that I was the recipient of covert glances of admiration, not unmixed with envy, from the various members of that little band of heroic sufferers in the cause of etiquette. When the “shaurie” was at length resumed, we gained a lot of interesting information. We found that the people who had attacked Finlay and Gibbons were the Wa’M’bu, who live two days’ journey to the north of Maranga, on the south-east slopes of Mount Kenia. They had a very bad reputation. The Maranga people spoke of them with bated breath, and remarked that they were “bad, very bad,” and that if we went through their country we should certainly be killed. Jamah Mahomet’s safari, numbering nearly 100 guns, had refused to go through M’bu, and had turned off to the west from Maranga, to go round the west side of Mount Kenia and thence northward to Limeru, as the district north-east of Kenia is called by the Swahilis. There are many different peoples between Maranga and M’thara, the most northerly inhabited country, though they are all A’kikuyu in blood. Beyond M’thara the desert stretches away to southern Somaliland and Abyssinia, with Lake Rudolph in the foreground about twelve days’ march north-west of M’thara. The Maranga elders entreated us very urgently to go round west of Kenia by the same route as Jamah Mahomet and Co., but we did not see things in the same light at all. We were three white men with twenty-five guns; and, as El Hakim observed, we were “not to be turned from our path and our plans disarranged by a pack of howling savages, however bad a reputation they might have”—a decision we conveyed to our Maranga friends forthwith. They heard it with much raising of hands and rolling of eyes, and clearly regarded us as persons of unsound mind, who really ought to be kept in confinement; but still, they said, if we were determined to court a premature end in M’bu, why, they would do all in their power to help us—an ambiguity we indulgently excused in consideration of the evident sincerity of their wish to advise us for our good.