"I love the unknown better than the known," he said. "We shall never see the lake again as Burton saw it--before ever the sound of engine and paddle-wheel had been heard on that broad blue expanse, when the monkeys chattered and screamed and slung themselves from tree to tree in a tumult of wonder at sight of the white wayfarer. Nobody can ever enjoy the sense of rapture and surprise that took Cameron's breath away as he looked down from the hills and saw the wide-reaching, pale blue water flashing in the sun. He took the lake itself for a cloud at the first glance, and a little islet for the lake, and asked his men, with bitterest chagrin, 'Is this all?' And then the niggers pointed, and these vast waters spread themselves out of the cloud, and he saw this mighty sea shining out of its dark frame of mountain and plain forest. Jupiter, what a moment! _I_ could never enjoy that surprise. I had read Cameron's book, and he had discounted the situation for me; he had swindled me out of my emotions. I knew the breadth and length of the lake to within a mile--no chance of mistake for _me_. Yes, I said. Here is the Tanganyika, and it is a very fine sheet of blue water; and pray where is the Swiss porter to take my luggage? or where shall I find the omnibus for the best hotel? Mark me, lads, before we have been long underground, there will be hotels and omnibuses and Swiss porters, and the Cooks and Gazes of the future will deal in through tickets to the African lakes, and this great heart of Africa will be the Englishman's favourite holiday ground. Let but the tramway Stanley talks about be laid from Bagamoyo to the interior, and 'Arry will be lord of Central Africa, as he is of the rest of the earth." Idle talk in idle hours beside the camp-fire. Though the days were as sunny and summer-like as February on the Riviera, the nights were cold; and after sundown masters and men liked to sit by their fires and watch the pine-wood crackle and the flames leap through the smoke like living things, vanish and reappear, fade into darkness or flicker into light with swifter and more sudden movement than even the thoughts of the men who watched them. The porters and servants had their own huts and their own fires. They had made a rough stockade round the cluster of bee-hive huts--a snug settlement, which Allan compared to a mediæval fortress, one of the Scottish castles, whose inhabitants live and move in the pages of the Wizard of the North. Allan was a devoted worshipper of Scott, whom he held second only to Shakespeare; and as Cecil Patrington claimed exactly this position for Charles Dickens, the question afforded an inexhaustible subject for argument, sometimes mild and philosophical, sometimes vehement and angry, to which Geoffrey listened yawningly, or into which he plunged with superior vehemence and arbitrary assertion if it were his humour to be interested.