Altogether He Was A Great Traveller, And He Had A Natural Taste For Geography And Botany, That Marked Him As A Wonderful Exception To The Average Of The Party.

He had run away from his master in Egypt, and had been vagabondizing about in Khartoum in handsome clothes, negro-like, persuading himself that the public admired him, and thought that he was a Bey.

Having soon run through his money, he had engaged himself to Koorshid Aga to serve in his White Nile expedition.

He was an excellent example of the natural instincts of the negro remaining intact under all circumstances. Although remarkably superior to his associates, his small stock of knowledge was combined with such an exaggerated conceit, that he was to me a perpetual source of amusement, while he was positively hated by his comrades, both by Arabs and blacks, for his overbearing behaviour. Having seen many countries, he was excessively fond of recounting his adventures, all of which had so strong a colouring of the "Arabian Nights," that he might have been the original "Sinbad the Sailor." His natural talent for geography was really extraordinary; he would frequently pay me a visit, and spend hours in drawing maps with a stick upon the sand, of the countries he had visited, and especially of the Mediterranean, and the course from Egypt and Constantinople to England. Unfortunately, some long story was attached to every principal point of the voyage. The descriptions most interesting to me were those connected with the west bank of the White Nile, as he had served some years with the trading party, and had penetrated through the Makkarika, a cannibal tribe, to about two hundred miles west of Gondokoro. Both he and many of Ibrahim's party had been frequent witnesses to acts of cannibalism, during their residence among the Makkarikas. They described these cannibals as remarkably good people, but possessing a peculiar taste for dogs and human flesh. They accompanied the trading party in their razzias, and invariably ate the bodies of the slain. The traders complained that they were bad associates, as they insisted upon killing and eating the children which the party wished to secure as slaves: their custom was to catch a child by its ankles, and to dash its head against the ground; thus killed, they opened the abdomen, extracted the stomach and intestines, and tying the two ankles to the neck they carried the body by slinging it over the shoulder, and thus returned to camp, where they divided it by quartering, and boiled it in a large pot. Another man in my own service had been a witness to a horrible act of cannibalism at Gondokoro.

The traders had arrived with their ivory from the West, together with a great number of slaves; the porters who carried the ivory being Makkarikas. One of the slave girls attempted to escape, and her proprietor immediately fired at her with his musket, and she fell wounded; the ball had struck her in the side.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 139 of 343
Words from 71854 to 72355 of 178435