There was leisure and to spare for argument and discussion here in this quiet settlement on the shore of the great lake. The travellers had established themselves in a deserted _tembe_, which had been allotted to them by the Arab chieftain of the land, and which was pleasantly situated on a ridge of rising ground about a mile from the busy village of Ujiji. They had done all that laborious ingenuity could do to purify the rough clay structure, ridding it as far as possible of the plague of insects that crawled in the darkness below or buzzed in the thatch above, of the rats which the dusk of evening brought out in gay and familiar riot, and the snakes that followed in their train, and the huge black spiders, whose webs choked every corner. They had knocked out openings under the deep eaves of the thatched roof--openings which allowed of cross-currents of air, and were regarded by their Zanzibaris and Unyanyembis with absolute horror. Only once in their pilgrimage had the travellers found a hut with windows. "What does a man want in his _tembe_ but warmth and shelter? And how can these white men be so foolish as to make openings that let in the cold?" argued the native mind; nor was the native mind less exercised by the trouble these three white men took to keep their _tembe_ and its surroundings, the verandah, the ground about it, severely clean, or by their war of extermination against that insect life whose ravages the African suffers with a stoical indifference. The travellers had established themselves in this convenient spot--close to the port and market of Ujiji--to wait for the Masika, the season of rain that raineth every day--rain that closes round the camp like a dense wall of water--such rain as a man must go to the tropics to see, and which, once having seen, he is not likely to forget. They could hardly be better off anywhere, when the rains of April should come upon them, than they would be here. The natives were friendly; friendly too, friendly and kind and helpful, was the mighty Arab chief Roumariza, the white Arab, sovereign lord of these regions, sole master here, where the sceptre of the Sultan of Zanzibar reaches not: a man whose word is law, and in whose hand is plenty. Roumariza looked upon Cecil Patrington's party with the eye of favour, and upon Patrington as an old friend--nay, almost a subject of his own, so familiar was Patrington's bronzed face in those regions, whither he had come close upon the footsteps of Cameron, and when that lake land of tropical Africa was still a new world, untrodden by the white man's foot, the northern shores of the lake still unexplored, the vast country of Rua unknown even to the Arabs. At Ujiji provisions were plentiful and cheap. At Ujiji there were boat-builders; and canoes and rowers were at hand for the exploration of the vast fresh-water sea. Indeed, there was only too much civilization and human life to please that son of the wilderness, Cecil Patrington.