[#] "You conquered him with words, Great Master, you defeated him, that German. But when you left he said to his people: ’I don’t hate him, that Englishman. He is a man.’" Roger rode away musing from this encounter, or rather rode and walked over an exceedingly rough country with scarcely a native path or sign of habitation, a country depopulated doubtless by former wars and raids of tribe on tribe: for it was well watered. The tall clumps of Euphorbias gave the red landscape a sinister look, for their articulated branches looked like a conjunction of gigantic scorpions, bodies meeting together and stinging tails erected in the air; the fleshy-leaved aloes of deep bottle-green sent up blood-red stalks of blood-red tubular flowers; on the higher ground there were many rust-red or red-lead-coloured "red-hot pokers"—what the initiated call Kniphofias. The country somehow suggested blood and iron; for the old and faded Euphorbias might have been cut out of rusty metal, and iron ore was so obviously permeating the rocks. He mused on the violence to which Africa always seemed a prey. The reign of law in East Africa in both the British and German spheres seemed to be preceded by the reign of the outlaws. He knew enough as a traveller and an ex-official, and as a resident in the lands bordering on the British sphere, to be aware that just then the British hinterland was a prey to German and British, Austrian, American, South African and even Goanese-Indian buccaneers, who obeyed no laws or injunctions of the feeble Chartered Company or of the weak young Protectorate Government which followed.