We lunched on some of the guinea-fowl I had shot in the forenoon. Ramathani somehow boiled them tender. Afterwards we held a “shaurie” (council), at which old Manga and many of his elders attended. We wanted all the information we could obtain about our road northward, the districts we should have to pass through, and the position of the various streams and camping-places.
We were smoking Egyptian cigarettes, a box of which we numbered among our most precious possessions, and it was rather a nuisance to have to pass a freshly lighted cigarette round the circle of natives squatted in front of El Hakim’s tent for each to take a whiff. They could not properly appreciate them, and it seemed to me very much like casting pearls before swine. In addition, when the cigarette was returned, the end was chewed about, and a good smoke thereby spoiled. If we lit another, the same process was repeated. The native gentlemen called it etiquette. I considered it downright sinful waste, an opinion in which El Hakim evidently concurred, as, after we had had several cigarettes spoiled in this provoking manner, he turned to me and said, “Get out your box of ‘stinkers,’ Hardwick, and let’s try the old gentlemen with those.”
I thought it was a splendid idea, so I brought out two of them, and, lighting one myself, handed the other to old Manga. He glanced at it suspiciously, turning it over and over in his grimy paws. He had apparently never seen a cigar before, but seeing me smoking a similar specimen, he at last ventured to light it. It seemed to grate on him a little, but he said nothing, and puffed stolidly away for a moment or two, though I could see his powers of self-control were being exerted to the utmost. After a game struggle the cigar scored a distinct success, and Manga, deliberately passing it on to the elder on his right, rose slowly, and, stalking with great dignity out of camp, disappeared behind a clump of bushes.
The old man to whom he handed it gazed wonderingly after him for a moment, then, placing the fatal weed between his aged lips, he took a long pull and inhaled the smoke. A startled look appeared in his dim old eyes, and he threw a quick glance in my direction; but I was calmly puffing away at mine, so he said nothing either, and took another whiff. In a few short moments he in his turn was vanquished, and, handing the cigar to his next neighbour, retired with great dignity to the clump of bushes, where he and old Manga offered up sacrifices to the goddess Nicotina with an unanimity that was as surprising as it was novel.
It was only with the very greatest difficulty that we managed to control our risible faculties. We were inwardly convulsed with laughter at the facial expressions of the old gentlemen before and after tasting the fearsome weed. The looks of delighted, though timorous, anticipation, the startled realization, and the agonized retrospection, which in turn were portrayed on the usually blank and uninteresting countenances of Manga’s Ministers of State, was a study in expression that was simply killing. One by one they tasted it; one by one they retired to the friendly clump of bushes that concealed their exaltation from prying eyes; and one by one they returned red-eyed and shaky, and resumed their places, inwardly quaking, though outwardly unmoved.
We also had to get up and go away, but not for the same purpose. If we had not gone away and laughed, we should have had a fit or burst a blood-vessel. It was altogether too rich. We returned red-eyed and weary also, and I believe that the old gentlemen thought that we had been up to the same performance as themselves, though they could not understand how I resumed my cigar on my reappearance, and continued smoking with unruffled serenity. I made a point of finishing my smoke to the last half-inch, and all through the “shaurie” that succeeded I became aware that I was the recipient of covert glances of admiration, not unmixed with envy, from the various members of that little band of heroic sufferers in the cause of etiquette.
When the “shaurie” was at length resumed, we gained a lot of interesting information. We found that the people who had attacked Finlay and Gibbons were the Wa’M’bu, who live two days’ journey to the north of Maranga, on the south-east slopes of Mount Kenia. They had a very bad reputation. The Maranga people spoke of them with bated breath, and remarked that they were “bad, very bad,” and that if we went through their country we should certainly be killed.
Jamah Mahomet’s safari, numbering nearly 100 guns, had refused to go through M’bu, and had turned off to the west from Maranga, to go round the west side of Mount Kenia and thence northward to Limeru, as the district north-east of Kenia is called by the Swahilis.
There are many different peoples between Maranga and M’thara, the most northerly inhabited country, though they are all A’kikuyu in blood. Beyond M’thara the desert stretches away to southern Somaliland and Abyssinia, with Lake Rudolph in the foreground about twelve days’ march north-west of M’thara.
The Maranga elders entreated us very urgently to go round west of Kenia by the same route as Jamah Mahomet and Co., but we did not see things in the same light at all. We were three white men with twenty-five guns; and, as El Hakim observed, we were “not to be turned from our path and our plans disarranged by a pack of howling savages, however bad a reputation they might have”—a decision we conveyed to our Maranga friends forthwith. They heard it with much raising of hands and rolling of eyes, and clearly regarded us as persons of unsound mind, who really ought to be kept in confinement; but still, they said, if we were determined to court a premature end in M’bu, why, they would do all in their power to help us—an ambiguity we indulgently excused in consideration of the evident sincerity of their wish to advise us for our good.