Then he asked me, “What good thing was it which a man eats, and which he constantly fastens his eyes upon while he eats, and after eating, throws a half away?” I thought and considered, but I never knew what it was until he told me that it was a roasted ear of Indian corn.
That old man was a very wise one, and among some of his sayings was that “When people dream much, the old moon must be dying.”
He also said that “When the old moon is dying, the hunter need never leave home to seek game, because it is well known that he would meet nothing.”
And he further added, that at that time the potter need not try to bake any pots, because the clay would be sure to be rotten.
Some other things which he said made me think a little of their meaning.
He said, “When people have provisions in their huts, they do not say, Let us go into another man’s house and rob him.”
He also said, “When you see a crook-back, you do not ask him to stand straight, nor an old man to join the dance, nor the man who is in pain, to laugh.”
And what he said about the traveller is very true. The man who clings to his own hearth does not tickle our ears, like him who sees many lands, and hears new stories.
The next day I stopped at a village near the little lake of Kitesa’s called Mtukura. The chief in charge loved talking so much, that he soon made me as well acquainted with the affairs of his family as though he courted my sister. His people are accustomed to eat frogs and rats, and from the noise in the reeds, and the rustling and squealings in the roof of the hut I slept in, I think there is little fear of famine in that village. Nor are they averse, they tell me, to iguanas and those vile feeders, the hyenas.
It is a common belief in the country that it was Naraki, a wife of Uni, a sultan of Unyoro, who made that lake. While passing through, she was very thirsty, and cried out to her Muzimu (spirit), the Muzimu which attends the kings of Unyoro, and which is most potent. And all at once there was a hissing flight of firestones (meteorites) in the air, and immediately after, there was a fall of a monstrously large one, which struck the ground close to her, and made a great hole, out of which the water spurted and continued leaping up until a lake was formed, and buried the fountain out of sight, and the rising waters formed a river, which has run north from the lake ever since into the Kafu.