"It's an old friend of yours," said Carter. "My people tell me that this old god-box contains the stone of the Ochori." "Oh!" said Sanders, with sudden interest. He breakfasted with his subordinate, inspected his little garrison of thirty, visited his farm, admired his sweet potatoes, and patronised his tomatoes. Then he went back to the boat and wrote a short dispatch in the tiniest of handwriting on the flimsiest of paper slips. "In case!" said Sanders. "Bring me 14," he said to his servant, and Abiboo came back to him soon with a pigeon in his hand. "Now, little bird," said Sanders, carefully rolling his letter round the red leg of the tiny courier and fastening it with a rubber band, "you've got two hundred miles to fly before sunrise to-morrow--and 'ware hawks!" Then he gathered the pigeon in his hand, walked with it to the stern of the boat, and threw it into the air. His crew of twelve men were sitting about their cooking-pot--that pot which everlastingly boils. "Yoka!" he called, and his half-naked engineer came bounding down the slope. "Steam," said Sanders; "get your wood aboard; I am for Isisi." * * * * * There was no doubt at all that this new god was an extremely powerful one. Three hours from the city the _Zaire_ came up to a long canoe with four men standing at their paddles singing dolefully. Sanders remembered that he had passed a village where women, their bodies decked with green leaves, wailed by the river's edge. He slowed down till he came abreast of the canoe, and saw a dead man lying stark in the bottom. "Where go you with this body?" he asked. "To Isisi, lord," was the answer. "The middle river and the little islands are places for the dead," said Sanders brusquely. "It is folly to take the dead to the living." "Lord," said the man who spoke, "at Isisi lives a god who breathes life; this man"--he pointed downwards--"is my brother, and he died very suddenly because of a leopard. So quickly he died that he could not tell us where he had hidden his rods and his salt. Therefore we take him to Isisi, that the new god may give him just enough life to make his relations comfortable." "The middle river," said Sanders quietly, and pointed to such a lone island, all green with tangled vegetation, as might make a burying ground. "What is your name?" "Master, my name is N'Kema," said the man sullenly. "Go, then, N'Kema," he said, and kept the steamer slow ahead whilst he watched the canoe turn its blunt nose to the island and disembark its cargo. Then he rang the engines full ahead, steered clear of a sandbank, and regained the fairway. He was genuinely concerned.