In a land where there was no daily record of what mankind were doing, no newspaper at morning and evening recounting the last pages of the world's history, telling the story of yesterday's crimes and catastrophes, sickness and death, wrong and right, evil and good, adventures, successes, failures, inventions, gains and losses--every movement near or far in the great mill-wheel of human life--deprived of newspapers, of civilized society, and of all the business of money-getting and money-spending, it was only in such discussions that these exiles could find subjects for conversation. The contents of the letters and papers that had reached them three months before at Tabora, brought on from Zanzibar by an Arab caravan bound for the hunting-grounds of Rua, had been long exhausted; and now there was only the populace of the great romancers to talk about in the long chilly evenings, when they were in no mood for piquet or poker, and too lazy-brained for the arduous pleasures of chess. Then it was pleasant to lie in front of the fire and dispute the merits of one's favourite novelist, or some abstract question in the regions of philosophy. Sometimes the three men's talk would wander from Dickens to Plato, from Scott to Aristotle, from Macaulay to Thucydides. Allan was the most bookish of the three, and his knowledge of German enabled him to carry the lightest of travelling-libraries, in the shape of that handy series of little paper-covered books which includes the best German authors, together with translations of all the classics, ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, Norse, English, French, Italian, at twopence-halfpenny per volume--tiny booklets, of which he could carry half a dozen in the pockets of his flannel jacket, and which comprised the literature of the world in the smallest possible compass. For more than a year, these three men had been dependent upon one another's society for all intellectual solace, for all mental comfort; for more than a year they had looked upon no white faces but their own, so tanned and darkened by sun and weather that they had come to talk of themselves laughingly as white Arabs, or semi-negroids, and to opine that they would never look like Englishmen again. Indeed, Cecil Patrington, whose fifteen years of manhood had been chiefly spent under tropic stars, had no desire ever again to wear the sickly aspect of the home-keeping Englishman, whom he spoke of disparagingly as a turnip-face. Bronzed and battered, and hardened by the hard life of the desert, he laughed to scorn the amenities of modern civilization and the iron bondage of the claw-hammer coat.