days we came to a sufficiently extortionate arrangement,
by which I was to take thirty-five men to Urambo at
sixteen piastres per man—total £70, which was the
outside of what I could afford, and at least twice as
much as I ought to have paid. But I was in his power
and had to submit.
I tried to buy a donkey, and was asked 530 rupees
(£i£) for the only decent animal in the place; finally I
paid 240 for an evil beast worth thirty shillings.
TH E MARKET-PLACE, U JI JI .
But after all, Arabs, as I found, were not the only ones
who took advantage of one’s position in Africa, and
although they tried to make the best bargain they could,
their confidence in the white man was quite remarkable.
Of course I had no money at hand to pay Rumaliza with,
and when I informed him that I could only give him
drafts on Zanzibar, he made no difficulty whatever in
accepting them : his confidence was the more striking as
he could not read English, and had to take my word that
the amount was correctly stated.
310
I was rather anxious to start without delay, as I had
still a considerable portion of my journey to accomplish,
and besides the sanitary conditions of Ujiji were.such that
I did not wish to remain there longer than necessary.
In each house is a cesspool, and close by a well from
which the drinking water is drawn, so that it is no wonder
that a kind of yellow fever indigenous to the place should
affect so many people. Moreover, my room, though clean
to the eye, was a hot-bed of vermin. For all these
reasons, by June 20th, on which day I concluded my
bargain with Rumaliza, I was more than ready to turn
my back on the luxuries of Ujiji and be off. I discovered,
some time after leaving the place, that I had, without
knowing it, been partaking of human flesh two or three
times during my stay there. Rinderpest had destroyed
all the cattle and most of the goats, so that the few that
were brought over from the other side of the lake were
sold at a comparatively exorbitant price, ten yards of
calico being asked for each. Young slaves, on the other
hand, used to fetch only from four to six yards of calico;
and as a considerable portion of the population consisted
of Manyema cannibals, children used often to be slaughtered
and their meat retailed among the Manyema. Some of
the natives whom I had engaged at Ujiji had been assured
by David that nothing could be hidden from me, and they
determined to test my power; they accordingly supplied
my cook with human flesh to see if I would find it out,
and I confess that I ate it with great relish, unconscious
of what it was. David found this out afterwards, but
was afraid to tell me about i t ; however, to avoid a
repetition of the experiment, he only bought meat from
goats he saw killed himself. It was only afterwards that
he told me about it. I then remembered eating a curry
I thought excellent, and having brought to me some
grilled bones that I enjoyed so much that I asked several
times for more of them, but without being able to get
them : these, it appears, were human ribs. So far as I can