I caught my breath. It was almost uncanny, the way Chalmers’s little idiosyncrasies were explaining themselves, bit by bit. I felt the cold wind of a deterministic law blowing over my shoulder--as cold as Calvinism. I had always loved temperament and its vagaries. Now I wasn’t sure I wanted the light in Chalmers’s eyes explained, to the last gleam. Mightn’t any of us ever be inexplicable and irresponsible and delightful? “Of course they had given us maps in Mozambique--not official ones, oh, no! Those would have come too high. The Nyassa Company had to pretend to be amiable, but they didn’t fork out anything they didn’t have to. Small loss the official maps were, I fancy; but those we had weren’t much good. It wasn’t, however, a difficult journey to make, from that point of view, and the cheerful savage who had abandoned our hero swore he knew where to take us. In eight weeks, we reached the spot that he declared to be the scene of the death from fever. I dare say he was right; he knew the villages along the way; he had described the topography, more or less, before we started, and it tallied. We pitched camp and spent three horrible days there. It is needless to say that we might as well have hunted for the poor fellow’s bones under the parapet at Ravello. I saw--and if you’ll believe me, I positively hadn’t seen before--what moonshine it all was. She ought to have been put to bed and made to pray God to make her a good girl, before she dragged anybody--even me--out on such a wild-goose chase as that. There wasn’t a relic--except certain signs of some one’s having cleared ground there before, and one or two indescribable fragments, picked up within a five-hundred-yard radius, that might have been parts of tin cans. Why should there have been? If there had been any plunder, natives would have found and taken it, as they would inevitably have removed and destroyed any corporal vestiges out of sheer superstition and hostility. I had learned their little ways, since Ravello. The rank soil in the wet season would have done the rest. I wondered--cruelly, no doubt--whether she had expected him to bury himself with a cairn atop and a few note-books (locked up in a despatch-box) decorously waiting for her in his grave. On the strength of the savage’s positive declaration that at such a distance--two days--from the last village, beyond such a stream, beneath such and such a clump of trees, he had seen the white man fall in the last delirium, she searched the place, as you might say, with a microscope. I thought it extremely likely that the fellow was lying for the sake of our pay, but I had to admit that I couldn’t prove it. Certainly, his information was the only thing we could reasonably go on; we couldn’t invest all Portuguese East Africa with an army and set them to digging up every square inch of soil in that God-forsaken country. If this clue failed, we could only return. But there was a moment when, in