However, Despite Rain, We Worked On Until Our Camp Was Finished And The Property Was Safely Stored From Weather And Thieves, And We Could Regard With Resignation The Raindrops Beating The Soil Into Mud Of A Very Tenacious Kind, And Forming Lakelets And Rivers Of Our Camp-Ground.

Towards night, the scene having reached its acme of unpleasantness, the rain ceased, and the natives poured into camp from the villages in the woods with their vendibles.

Foremost among these, as if in duty bound, came the village sultan - lord, chief, or head - bearing three measures of matama and half a measure of rice, of which he begged, with paternal smiles, my acceptance. But under his smiling mask, bleared eyes, and wrinkled front was visible the soul of trickery, which was of the cunningest kind. Responding under the same mask adopted by this knavish elder, I said, "The chief of Kingaru has called me a rich sultan. If I am a rich sultan why comes not the chief with a rich present to me, that he might get a rich return?" Said he, with another leer of his wrinkled visage, "Kingaru is poor, there is no matama in the village." To which I replied that since there was no matama in the village I would pay him half a shukka, or a yard of cloth, which would be exactly equivalent to his present; that if he preferred to call his small basketful a present, I should be content to call my yard of cloth a present.

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