Up the Niger

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 24 THE RESULT OF DRINK. Do you then acknowledge asked the Commissioner, that you yourself are such an inhuman person as to wish for the death of other human beings at your burial ? It is the custom of our country, shortly replied the king. It must end?my queen speaks but once, her word is law, and you have...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 24 THE RESULT OF DRINK. Do you then acknowledge asked the Commissioner, that you yourself are such an inhuman person as to wish for the death of other human beings at your burial ? It is the custom of our country, shortly replied the king. It must end?my queen speaks but once, her word is law, and you have already seen your town burned over your head for disobedience of her orders?so take warning. With these words the Commissioner passed to the matter of the king's treaties, and 'inquired if he fully understood what he had signed to some years before. To make more certain, the treaties (or book, as termed by the natives) were produced and read over to him, and we were satisfied that he knew well their contents. The palaver lasted for some hours, as the miserable monarch poured out to us all his affairs of state, from which we gathered that he was only in name a ruler, that several of his subordinate chiefs were not on speaking terms with him, and that his smallest actions were dependent on the will of his people. His character is one of the weakest that I have ever come across, and doubtless trade-gin is at the bottom of it all. Addicted to drink from his earliest years, he has become bloated and debilitated in mind and in body; forced to keep aloof from the outside world, his mind is simply bounded by his own mud walls, and it would have been wonderful if he had been anything different from what he is. Bidding the wretched man a friendly farewell, and receiving from him many promises which we knew he would never keep, we gave him his presents and left the royal enclosure. As we returned through the town, sounds of music and singing greeted our ears, and after some difficulty we discovered whence it arose, and entered the courtyard of a small house, where ...