“We held another shauri, when it was agreed that if we stayed longer we might get into trouble and lose our ivory, and that it was better to leave within two days. But we did not have to wait two days for the trouble! It came even before we had finished our shauri. We heard a woman scream loud. We rushed out, and met some Wangwana running towards us, and among them a woman with a dwarf’s arrow in her breast. “‘What’s this, what’s this?’ we asked, and they cried out, ‘The dwarfs shot this woman while she was drawing water, and they are coming in immense numbers towards us from all the other villages. It’s a war, prepare yourselves!’ “We were not a bit too soon: we had scarcely put on our belts and seized our guns before the vicious wretches were upon us, and shooting their reed arrows in clouds. They screamed and yelled just like monkeys. Many of our people fell dead instantly from the poison before we could get together and fire on them. Mtagamoyo! he was everywhere brandishing his two-handed sword, and cleaving them as you would cleave a banana. The arrows passed through his shirt in many places. There were many good fellows like Mtagamoyo there, and they fought well; but it was of no use. The dwarfs were firing from the top of the trees; they crept through the tall grass close up to us, and shot their arrows in our faces. Then Mtagamoyo, seeing it was getting hot work, shouted ‘Boma! Boma! Boma!’ (palisade), and some hundreds of us cut down banana-trees, tore doors out, and houses down, and formed a boma at each end of the street, and then we were a little better off, for it was not such rapid, random shooting; we fired more deliberately, and after several hours drove them off. “Do you think they gave us peace? Not a bit; a fresh party came up and continued the fight. They were such small things, we could not see them very well; had they been tall men like us, we might have picked off hundreds of them. We could not fight all the time, for some of us had to sleep, so Mtagamoyo divided us into two parties, one party to go to sleep, the other to watch the boma. All night we heard the reed arrows flying past, or pattering on the roofs or the boma fence; all night we heard their yells. Once or twice they tried to storm the boma, but we had twenty muskets at each end. “Well, the fight lasted all that night, and all the next day, and throughout the next night. And we could get no water, until Mtagamoyo called out a hundred fellows, fifty with muskets and fifty with big water-pots, to follow him. Mtagamoyo was a lion; he held up a shield before him, and looking around he just ran straight where the crowd was thickest; and he seized two of the dwarfs, and we who followed him caught several more, for they would not run away until they saw what our design was, and then they left the water clear. We filled our pots, and carried the little Shaitans (devils) into the boma; and there we found we had caught the king!