“And would they obey you?”
“Kali’s father wear leopard skin and Kali, too.”
Stasch understood that this meant that Kali’s father was a king and that he was the eldest son and the future ruler of the Wa-himas. And so he inquired further:
“You told me once that white travelers had visited you and that the older people remember them?”
“Yes; and Kali has heard that they wore a great deal of percale on their heads.”
“Ah,” thought Stasch to himself, “so they were not Europeans, but Arabs, whom the negroes, judging from the light color of their skins and their white clothes, mistook for white people.”
But as Kali remembered nothing about them and could give no further description of them, Stasch put another question to him.
“Did not the Wa-himas kill any of these people dressed in white?”
“No; neither the Wa-himas nor the Samburus can do that.”
“Why not?”