“We were very near the line of Rhodesia, and for various reasons we decided to cross over and come down far enough south through British territory to strike the Zambesi and its boats. If there was any information to be picked up, we should be more likely to find it in that direction than by going back the way we had come, which was utterly barren of clues. I had reason to suppose that the others who had survived the fever had gone on to the Rhodesian villages. We started in the cool of dawn, and I ought to say that there were no backward glances on her part. She was convinced that there was nothing in that precise spot for her; and I think she had hope of finding something in the miles just beyond. I could see that she did not more than half believe the identifications of the negro who had been on the earlier expedition. True, his guttural gibberish did not sound like information; but, after all, he was the only link we had with that supreme and sordid adventure. We pushed on.” Chalmers threw back his head and stretched his arms, but went on presently in a more vibrant, a more intimately reminiscent tone. The club was nearly empty--it was getting on for midnight. I seemed to myself to be quite alone with the tortoise that upheld the world. “I suppose this is the point in the narrative to say a rather difficult thing--though it ought to be clear that I’ve no cause or wish to paint myself anything but the mottled color most of us are. I spoke of what the tropics had done to her: fulfilled her in all kinds of ways. We had strange talks by the fire at night, moving on, after the necessary practical discussions, into regions of pure emotion. The emotion was all over the incidents we encountered; we marshalled our facts and made our decisions, and then leaned back and generalized with passion. Whatever Africa had done to her inwardly, it had at least taught her to talk. I had never had any particular sense of her being on guard--there _was_, from the very first, something strange and delicate in the flavor of our understanding--but now I had the sense of her being specifically and gloriously off her guard. We seemed to know each other awfully well.” Chalmers’s face, as he looked down at his pipe-bowl, was curiously boyish for an instant. He might have been speaking of a childhood playmate.