Once in bed, she felt less acutely ill, but of all the nice meal that John and the Swahili man-cook had prepared she could only swallow a cup of tea. Her temperature was found to be up to 102°, so the first and the six succeeding nights of the honeymoon were spent in dire illness and dreary convalescence. But at the end of that time she seemed well enough to start on their up-country journey. John had obtained two Masai donkeys and had bought at Unguja a second-hand side-saddle. Lucy cheered up at the prospect of donkey-riding and above all at leaving this terribly hot coast town for the cooler nights of the interior. Though still deeply depressed and disheartened, she was sufficiently reasonable and well-disposed to be deeply touched by her husband’s care of her, his forethought for her comfort and distress at the inconveniences of semi-savage Africa. Some measure of health came back to her, and even cheerfulness, during the first easy days of camp life, before they left the semi-civilized coast-belt, with its shady mango-trees for the midday halt, its unfailing water supply for the thirsty porters and the white man’s meals; its comparative safety at night from wild beasts and wild natives. But between the mountain ranges of the interior—whither they were bound—and this settled country of cultivation and villages more or less governed by the Sultan of Unguja, there lay a desert tract almost devoid of water and ravaged in recent times by a clan of the raiding Masai known to the Bantu natives as "Wahumba." They had recently carried out a ruthless foray across the plains. The native wells had fallen in or their location had been forgotten since the destruction of the villages. Lucy then knew for the first time what it was to suffer from thirst, and to have no water for washing in the morning or evening; and when a little water was obtained from nearly dried up rock-pools or the bed of a run-dry stream, to be hardly able to endure the sight of it, much less taste it when it looked like strong tea, or coffee-and-milk, when it smelt of stable manure or was alive with grubs or wriggling worms. It could only be drunk in the form of tea after it had been strained, boiled, and skimmed.