He Told Us He Is Often Threatened By
Elephants, But He Sedulously Keeps Them Off With Charms; For If
They Ever Tasted A Plantain They Would Never Leave The Garden
Until They Had Cleared It Out.
He then took us to see the
nearest falls of the Nile - extremely beautiful, but very
confined.
The water ran deep between its banks, which were
covered with fine grass, soft cloudy acacias, and festoons of
lilac convolvuli; whilst here and there, where the land had
slipped above the rapids, bared places of red earth could be
seen, like that of Devonshire; there, too, the waters, impeded by
a natural dam, looked like a huge mill-pond, sullen and dark, in
which two crocodiles, laving about, were looking out for prey.
From the high banks we looked down upon a line of sloping wooded
islets lying across the stream, which divide its waters, and, by
interrupting them, cause at once both dam and rapids. The whole
was more fairy-like, wild, and romantic than - I must confess
that my thoughts took that shape - anything I ever saw outside of
a theatre. It was exactly the sort of place, in fact, where,
bridged across from one side-slip to the other, on a moonlight
night, brigands would assemble to enact some dreadful tragedy.
Even the Wanguana seemed spellbound at the novel beauty of the
sight, and no one thought of moving till hunger warned us night
was setting in, and we had better look out for lodgings.
Start again, and after drinking pombe with Nango, when we heard
that three Wakungu had been seized at Kari, in consequence of the
murder, the march was commenced, but soon after stopped by the
mischievous machinations of our guide, who pretended it was too
late in the day to cross the jungles on ahead, either by the road
to the source or the palace, and therefore would not move till
the morning; then, leaving us, on the pretext of business, he
vanished, and was never seen again. A small black fly, with
thick shoulders and bullet-head, infests the place, and torments
the naked arms and legs of the people with its sharp stings to an
extent that must render life miserable to them.
After a long struggling march, plodding through huge grasses and
jungle, we reached a district which I cannot otherwise describe
than by calling it a "Church Estate." It is dedicated in some
mysterious manner to Lubari (Almighty), and although the king
appeared to have authority over some of the inhabitants of it,
yet others had apparently a sacred character, exempting them from
the civil power, and he had no right to dispose of the land
itself. In this territory there are small villages only at every
fifth mile, for there is no road, and the lands run high again,
whilst, from want of a guide, we often lost the track. It now
transpired that Budja, when he told at the palace that there was
no road down the banks of the Nile, did so in consequence of his
fear that if he sent my whole party here they would rob these
church lands, and so bring him into a scrape with the wizards or
ecclesiastical authorities.
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