For employment’s sake I sat down to recalculate all my observations with exactitude, to correct certain discrepancies that our journeys over the same ground had enabled me to detect; and buried in my Norie, and figures and charts, my mind was fully occupied. But on the 14th my work was done. I lived in hope the next day, with my hearing on the strain for the sound of voices. The people looked miserable, but hopeful. A box of European provisions was opened, a pot of butter and milk were taken out, and a table-spoonful of each dropped into the earthenware pots that were already filled with boiling water. In this manner a thin broth was made which would serve to protract the agony of existence. On the sixth day the pots were again ranged round me in a semi-circle, and in rotation, each cook brought his vessel of hot water to receive his butter and milk, and after being well stirred, marched off with his group to distribute the broth according to measure. A little heartened by the warm liquid they scattered through the woods to hunt up the red berries of the phrynia, and pick up now and then the amomum, whose sour-sweet pulp appeared to quiet the gnawing of the stomach. A mushroom in the course of several hundred yards’ rambling would perhaps fall to the lot of the seeker. But when 130 men have wandered about and about, to and fro, searching for the edibles, the circle widens, and day by day the people had to penetrate further and further away from the camp. And it happened that while searching with eagerness, impelled on and on by the eager stomach, that they were carried some miles away, and they had paid no regard to the course they were going; and when they wished to return to camp they knew not which way to seek it, and two full-grown men and Saburi, a little boy of eight years, did not return. I had a peculiar liking for the small child. His duty was to carry my Winchester, and cartridge pouch. He was usually a dark cherub, round as a roller, strong and sturdy, with an old man’s wisdom within his little boy’s head, and frequently when the caravan was on its mettle, and a fair road before it, I looked back often and often to see how little Saburi trotted steadily after me. Being the rifle-bearer, trained to be at my heels at any strange sound, I deprived myself of many a choice bit to nourish Saburi with, so that his round stomach had drawn a smile from all who looked at him. He looked like a little boy with a keg under his frock. But, alas! in the last few days the keg had collapsed, and he, like all the others, had penetrated into the wilderness of phrynia to search for berries. On this day he was lost.