Beautiful!" I thought myself
everything was going on as well as could be wished; but before
entering the royal
Enclosures, I found, to my disagreeable
surprise, that the men with Suwarora's hongo or offering, which
consisted of more than a hundred coils of wire, were ordered to
lead the procession, and take precedence of me. There was
something specially aggravating in this precedence; for it will
be remembered that these very brass wires which they saw, I had
myself intended for Mtesa, that they were taken from me by
Suwarora as far back as Usui, and it would never do, without
remonstrance, to have them boastfully paraded before my eyes in
this fashion. My protests, however, had no effect upon the
escorting Wakungu. Resolving to make them catch it, I walked
along as if ruminating in anger up the broad high road into a
cleared square, which divides Mtesa's domain on the south from
his Kamraviona's, or commander-in-chief, on the north, and then
turned into the court. The palace or entrance quite surprised me
by its extraordinary dimensions, and the neatness with which it
was kept. The whole brow and sides of the hill on which we stood
were covered with gigantic grass huts, thatched as neatly as so
many heads dressed by a London barber, and fenced all round with
the tall yellow reeds of the common Uganda tiger-grass; whilst
within the enclosure, the lines of huts were joined together, or
partitioned off into courts, with walls of the same grass.
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