She had chosen this unusual way of leaving the mission so that she might not be seen by any lurking natives on the forest road. The smooth peak of Kilima ja Mweze still served her for a guide, and feeling that she could rely a little on her sense of direction, she had expected to enter the forest at an unusual angle and make straight for the hill itself and the house of Godovius without ever touching the zigzag path which climbed the terraces. She stepped very quietly into the bush, and soon struck one of those tenuous paths which the goats of the Waluguru make on the hillsides where they are pastured. A matter of great luck this seemed to her: for she knew that it must surely lead directly to some village in the forest. She began to hurry, so that she might advance some way into the forest before the light failed. She ran till she lost her breath, and when she stopped and heard the beating of her own heart, she was thrilled with a delicious anticipation of success. It was all very adventurous, and her progress, so far, had seemed so secret that she couldn’t help feeling that luck was with her.
It was not long before she was disillusioned. Emerging from the path in the bush into a wider sandy lacuna, she found herself suddenly faced by Hamisi, a transfigured Hamisi, clothed in the German colonial uniform, and armed with a Mauser rifle. With him stood a second askari, one of the Waluguru whom she did not know. Both of them smiled as though they had been expecting her, showing the gap in the lower incisor teeth which the Waluguru knock out in imitation of the Masai. Hamisi saluted her, and she began to talk to him, much as a woman who talks in an ingratiating way to a dog of which she is afraid. But from the first she realised that it was no good talking. She guessed that these two men were only part of a cordon of sentries drawn about the mission, and that Godovius was relying on other things than the parole which she had broken so lightly. It hadn’t struck her until that moment that she had actually broken it. In a flash she began to wonder if M‘Crae would approve. It was strange how this dour new morality of his impressed her even in this emergency.
From the first she realised that her game was up. She saw how simple she had been in underrating the carefulness of her enemy. “How he would laugh at me,” she thought. “He” was M‘Crae. She knew very well that Hamisi, for all his smiles, had orders not to let her pass. Indeed she was rather frightened of this new and militant Hamisi. She made the best of a bad job, and rated him soundly in kitchen Swahili for having left her in the lurch when the bwana was ill. . . . Hamisi scratched his back under the new jersey and smiled. He was evidently very proud of his cartridge belt and rifle and the big aluminium water-bottle which he wore slung over his shoulder.