For the British sailor, though the bravest of the brave in battle, has ever a tender heart to a child or woman.
But there was one particular cry that rang all through this poor forlorn mob. When translated it was found to mean:
"Kill the devil—Oh, kill the devil-king!"
The awful odour of this blood-stained city cannot be described. Nor can the sights that were seen in the market-place and around the palace. The skulls set on sticks, the skeletons, the putrid bodies; the crucified men still rotting on the trees, their heads fallen down till the chins touched the breast-bone; the "man-meat" in joints left on the now deserted stalls, the joints not unlike those of black pig. But the most disgusting sight of all, perhaps, was to see naked black children squatting on the murdered dead or drumming on their chests with the bones of the skeletons. And there was, as Burns says, in his inimitable Tam o' Shanter,
"Mair o' horrible and awfu',
Which ev'n to name wad be unlawfu'".
What a surprise his sable Majesty got when our blue-jackets, to the number of twenty, stormed his harem!
He had expected his own warriors, with British heads to set on poles, with British joints to roast for dinner, and British men to torture and burn.
Tom Sinclair, of the Rattler, a beau-ideal seaman, led the rest. His white "bags", as he called them, were red and brown with blood, and his shirt besprinkled too. But his sun-tanned face looked as jolly as if he had only just come from a ball instead of a field of carnage.
"Yambo sana!" (a Swahili salute).
"Yambo sana!" he said to the king, who was stretched on a raised, mat-covered couch. "W'y, what a luxurious old cockalorum you are, to be sure!"