That evening I went to bed like a new man, and for the first night for long weeks slept until dawn, awaking hungry.  My leg began to mend.  We all saw the absurdity, if nothing else, of the treatment meted out to us, based on no better grounds than our supposed possession of a secret.  Laughter brought good hope.  Hope gave us courage, and courage set Fred and Will hunting for a means of escape.  We decided there and then that to wait for this Major Schunck to come from the coast and pass judgment on us was a ridiculous waste of time as well as highly dangerous.

The first discovery Fred and Will made was that there were footholds cut in the great granite rock in which the Bismarck medallion was set.  They climbed it, and discovered that from the summit they could see all Muanza harbor from the shore line to the island in the distance.  Sitting up there, they presently spotted a native dhow drawn up with bow to the beach with the indefinable, yet unescapable air of rather long disuse.

Resisting the first temptation to hurry along the shore and examine it, they returned to camp to tell me of the find, and sent Simba, Kazimoto’s understudy, to find out whose the dhow was and why it lay there.  They explained it was a fairly big dhow, and might be laid up there on account of leakiness.

But Simba came back grinning with the news that the dhow belonged to an Indian from British East who had been jailed for smuggling.  The dhow had been sold to pay his court fine, and was now owned by a Punjabi who had bought it as a speculation and repented already of his bargain, because the Germans would grant him no license to use it and nobody else would buy.

They went off again to have another distant view of it and to try and invent some means of inspecting it closely without betraying their purpose.  I was already able to walk with the aid of a stick, although not fast enough to keep up with them, and curiosity taking hold of me I called two of our servants to give me a supporting arm and limped off to see the grave the chain-gang had recently dug for me.

It was a struggle to get there, but it seemed to me the trip was worth it.  I found the grave about a foot too short, but otherwise commensurate, and sat down on a stone beside it to consider a number of things.  A convalescent man sitting beside his own grave may be forgiven for amusing himself with a lot of near-philosophy, and if I trespassed over the borders of common sense on that occasion I claim it was not without excuse.

My meditations were disturbed by the arrival on the scene of the very last man I expected.  We had been told that Professor Schillingschen had gone out on a journey, leaving his “wife” in the care of the commandant; yet I looked up suddenly to see him standing on the other side of the grave with both hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers and a grin of malevolent amusement showing through the tangled mass of hair that hid his lower face.