What a contrast was this blue-eyed two-year-old to such infancy as they had seen in villages along their road, the brown naked creatures rolling and grovelling in the dirt, and looking more like pug-dogs than children! When they had bidden good-bye to the friendly missionary and his domestic circle, they were not without childish life upon their way, for the Arabs with whom they had joined company had some women in their train, one a slave with a couple of children; and as the Arab law does not recognize slavery under adult age, these brats of six and seven were free, and not being goods and chattels, no provision was allowed for them, and the mother had to feed them out of her own scanty rations. Geoffrey was on more familiar terms with the Arabs than either Patrington or Allan, and, on discovering the state of things with the native mother and her sons, he took these two morsels of dusky humanity into his service, and set them to clean pots and pans, and treated them as a kind of lap-dogs, and let them dance to his wild fiddle music in the firelight in front of the tents, and would not allow them to be punished for their depredations among the pannikins of rice or the baskets of bananas. They crossed the swift and turbid Luama river, and encamped for a night upon its shores. And then came the harassing march in single file through the dense jungle--a hopeless monotony of rank foliage taller than the tallest of the travellers, a coarse and monstrous vegetation which lashed their faces and rent their clothing and caught their feet like wire snares set for poachers. Vain was it to put the porters with their loads in the forefront of the procession. The rank inexorable jungle closed behind them as they passed; and a four-hours' march through this pitiless scrub was worse than a ten-hours' tramp in the open. The days were sultry. The travellers deemed themselves lucky if the evening closed without a thunderstorm; and the storms in those regions were deadly. A fired roof and a blackened corpse in a hut next that occupied by the three friends testified to the awfulness of an African thunderstorm. The thatch blazed, the neighbours looked on, and the husband of the victim sat beside the disfigured form in a curious indifference, which might mean either bewilderment or want of feeling. "Twenty years ago the catastrophe next door would have been assuredly put down to our account," said Patrington, as they sat at supper after the storm, "and we should have had to pay for that poor lady with our persons or our goods--our goods, for choice, so much merikani, or so many strings of sami sami. But since the advent of the Arabs, reason has begun to prevail over unreason. The influence of Islam makes for civilization."