“Lord, I fear to say, lest you, too, should believe in my madness.”

“Speak,” said Sanders, “and have no fear; for I am as your father and your king, being placed here to rule you by a man who is very high in the council of kings.”

K’maka drew a long breath.

“I think of life,” he said, “and of the stars; of why men do certain acts. I think of rivers. Lord,” he asked, “why does a stone thrown into still water make little ripples in true circles widening, widening until the waves reach beyond sight?”

Sanders looked at him narrowly. He had heard of this thinker.

“Go on,” he said.

“Lord, this also I think,” Said K’maka, encouraged, “that I am nothing, that all is nothing”–he waved his hand to the white hot world–“that you, our lord, are nothing.”

“This is a shameful thing to say,” said the chief cousin, shocked, “and proves beyond doubt that he is mad.”

“Why am I nothing, K’maka?” asked Sanders quietly.

“Lord,” said the man gravely, “that-which-is-not-always is nothing.”

“Hear him!” appealed Sambili in despair. “Hear this madman. Oh ko ko! Now, K’maka, you have shown your madness to our lord beyond doubt.”

He waited for Sanders to summon the Man of Irons to shackle K’maka to the deck. Instead, Sanders was leaning against the rail, his head sunk in thought.

“K’maka,” he said at last, “it appears to me that you are a strange man; yet you are not mad, but wiser than any black man I have seen. Now you are so wise that if I leave you with your brethren they will surely kill you, for stupid men hate the learned, and it seems to me that you have too much learning.”

He gave orders that K’maka should be housed with the crew.

As for the cousins, he turned them into their canoe.

“Go in peace,” he said, “for you have rid yourself of your ‘madman’ and have saved yourself a hanging–I will have no putting out of eyes in this land.”

Sanders had no man handy to whom he might speak of the thinker, for his two subordinates were down with fever and on leave at the coast. He was inclined towards experiments. Bosambo of Monrovia had been an experiment, and a most successful one. Just now Bosambo was being a nuisance, as witness this journey which Sanders was making.

Contiguous to the land of the Ochori was a narrow strip of territory, which acted as a tiny buffer state between the Ochori and the Isisi. It occupied a peculiar position, inasmuch as though completely unimportant, it was desired by both the Ochori and the Isisi, and had at various times been absorbed by both, only to be ruthlessly restored to its neutrality by the iron hand of Sanders. There was no reason in the world why both nations should not have free access and passage through the Lombobo–as it was called–and a wise chief would have so ordered things that whilst Ochori man and Isisi moved in and through it, neither nation should claim the right to lordship.

This chief Sanders had been long in finding. He had appointed many. Kombanava the N’Gombi, who sold his kingship to the Isisi for a thousand rods and twenty bags of salt; Olambo of Akasava, who had hardly been installed before he bartered away his rights to Bosambo of the Ochori; M’nabo, the coast man; Tibini, the Lesser Isisi man; a whole string of little chiefs of Lombobo had come and gone.

Sanders thought of these, sitting under the awning of the bridge, as the Zaire drove through the black-yellows waters of the Big River.

He was very patient, and his was the patience of years. He was not discouraged, though the bitterness of a recent failure still rankled. For he had placed one Sakadamo in the seat of chieftainship, and he had known Sakadamo for years.

Yet once Sanders was out of sight, the mild Sakadamo, stiff with pride, had gathered his fighting men, and had led them with fine impartiality against Ochori and Isisi, and in the end had sold the country to both.

For which offence Sakadamo was at the moment working out a sentence of two years’ labour in the Village of Irons, and Lombobo was chiefless.

Sanders smoked two cigars over the matter, then he sent for K’maka the Thinker.

They brought him, a tall young man, inclined to thinness. Sanders took him in from the broad crown of his woolly head to the big feet which ended his thin legs. He had knobby knees, and the skin cloak which partially covered him revealed the same tendency to thinness.

Sanders put his age at nineteen, which was probably an accurate estimate.

“K’maka,” he said, after his survey, “such a man as you it is not usual to meet, nor have I met your like. Now I know you to be a man above ambition, above hates, and understanding large matters of life.”

“Lord, I am one who thinks, and I myself do not know whether my thoughts be mad thoughts or whether they are high above the common thoughts of men.”

“Take to yourself the pleasure of knowing that you are not mad,” said Sanders drily. “Surely I believe this, and to give you a sign of my faith I am for making you chief of Lombobo, standing in my place, giving and taking justice, and laying over the fiery spirit of your people the waters of your wisdom.”

“Lord, I will do as you wish,” said K’maka.

And so it came about that at a great palaver at which the headmen and lesser directors of the people were assembled, Sanders made the Thinker paramount chief and lord of the Lombobo tribe, hanging about his neck the steel chain and medal of his rank and office. To a separate palaver Bosambo and the Ring of the Isisi were summoned, and plain words were spoken.

After the Isisi had departed Sanders took the young chief a journey to the very edge of his new domain, and with them went Bosambo.

In a clearing on the very border, and by the side of the path which connected the two little countries, grew a great gum-tree, and here the party halted.

“Bosambo and K’maka,” said Sanders, “this tree shall mark which is Ochori and which is Lombobo. For all that is on one side belongs to one and all that is on the other belongs to the other.”

They looked at the tree, the two chiefs; they regarded it long and attentively.

“Lord,” said Bosambo at length, “your meaning is clear, yet in whose country does this tree stand?”

It was a question worthy of Bosambo.

“That half which faces the Ochori is in the Ochori country; that half which faces Lombobo is in the Lombobo country,” said Sanders.

One last warning he gave to K’maka.

“To Ochori and to Isisi,” he said, “you will give communion and freedom of trade; you shall hinder none, nor help any at the expense of the other. You shall be wise and large.”

“Lord, I will do this,” said K’maka, nodding his head, “for the things that grow and perish are nothing and only the spirits of men endure.”

With which wise saying in his ears Sanders took his departure, happy in the belief that Providence had sent him at last the solution of the buffer state problem.

It is placed on record that K’maka began his rule with wisdom. The Lombobo people, used by now to strange chiefs, did their best to help him to destruction. They brought forward litigation for his judgment–litigation which would have taxed the sagacity of a Supreme Court or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. As for instance:

“If a man buys a wife, paying for her with two bags of salt, and she be a vixen, and, moreover, undesirable from many points of view, how shall he recover the price he paid for her when the salt has been capsized out of his own canoe, rowed by two of his own paddlers and two of his father-in-law’s paddlers?” Also:

“A man has borrowed a neighbour’s spear to go hunting, and has invariably paid for the loan by a proportion of the kill. One day he went hunting with a defective spear, and became lamed by a leopard. Can he claim compensation because the spear was a bad one if the lender can prove that its defective condition is due to the carelessness of a mutual cousin?”

These were two of the problems they propounded, sitting in a solemn circle at palaver, and the Thinker judged at length. He was four days delivering his judgment in the first case. His people sat spellbound, hypnotised by words.