“Sauce! I don’t understand you, Ferajji?”
“Why, dry manioc—that is manioc with nothing but itself—manioc in the morning, and at noon, and at the sunset meal, and nothing but eternal manioc, with neither salt, nor fish, nor meat, nor oil, nor butter, nor fat of any kind to assist its passage down the gullet, is apt to cloy. Give the appetite something now and then new to smell, or see with the manioc, and the Zanzibari is satisfied. Without that the stomach by-and-by shuts the door, and won’t take anything, and men die.”
“I see, but I left salt in the storeroom. It was to purchase fish, bananas and palm oil that the brass rods, cowries and beads were for.”
“Ah, now you are drawing near the point, master. Sometimes—nay, we were a long time without either.”
“But if they were in the store, surely there must be some reason why they were not given out?”
“We come to the thieves again, who became so active that they sold our axes and bill-hooks, and sold them to the natives for fish. Those who shared in the fish refused to tell who the thieves were, and our rations of cowries and brass rods were stopped.”
“After all, Ferajji, though manioc by itself is very dry eating, it is very good food. Think of it, all the blacks from Banana to Stanley Falls live on it, why should not Zanzibaris of this expedition live on it as they lived during six years on the Congo with me. I cannot see any reason for manioc to kill 100 men in eleven months. Tell me when did the people begin to sicken.”
“There were about a dozen sick when you left, sick of ulcers, bowel and chest complaints. A few recovered; then, in about four weeks, many got very feeble, and some sank lower and thinner until they died, and we buried them. When our friends came up from Bolobo, we thought they looked very different from us at Yambuya. They were stout and strong—we were thin and dying. Then, in another month, the men from Bolobo began to sicken and die, and every few days we buried one, or two, or even three at a time. There was no difference after a while between the Yambuya and Bolobo men.”
“Had you any cholera, small-pox, fever, or dysentery among you?”
“No, the men did not die of any of those things. Perhaps the Somalis and Soudanese did not take kindly to the climate, but it was not the climate that killed the Zanzibaris. Oh——”