Postscript

Several readers kindly asked after Philip Jacobus Pretorius. They recalled how the summons from Holmes to meet Edward Grey led to the abandonment of my planned visit to the great jungles of central Africa. Subsequent obligations led to further postponements until, as happens, the entire enterprise fell away, to be dreamed about on cold winters’ evenings. Soon after the outbreak of the Great War a letter arrived from Pretorius, by then an officer in the British Imperial Government attached to Admiral King-Hall. To enlist in the service Pretorius had had to escape from German-occupied territory in East Africa, undergoing an ordeal in the vast jungles quite unparalleled in my own experience, despite my warring years in the deadly Frontier Tribal Areas of British India. His exceptional scouting skills were to lead to the hunt for the German raider SMS Königsberg, a light cruiser of the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy named after the Capital of Prussia. On 20 September 1914 she surprised and sank the British protected cruiser HMS Pegasus in the Battle of Zanzibar. With Pretorius’s involvement, revenge was soon to hand.

The End