The governors of districts, or kilolos, whether hereditary or appointed for four years, were distinguished by red waistcoats and zebra-skin caps; in their hands they brandished long rattans, coated at one extremity with a varnish of magic drugs.
The weapons carried by the soldiers consisted of wooden bows adorned with fringes and provided with a spare bowstring, knives filed into the shape of serpents' tongues, long, broad lances, and shields of palm wood, ornamented with arabesques. In the matter of uniform, the royal army had no demands to make upon the royal treasury.
Amongst the attendants of the king there was a considerable number of sorcerers and musicians. The sorcerers, or mganga, were practically the physicians of the court, the savages having the most implicit faith in divinations and incantations of every kind, and employing fetishes, clay or wooden figures, representing sometimes ordinary human beings and sometimes fantastic animals. Like the rest of the retinue, these magicians were, for the most part, more or less mutilated, an indication that some of their prescriptions on behalf of the king had failed of success.
The musicians were of both sexes, some performing on
[Illustration: Alvez advanced and presented the king with some fresh tobacco.]
shrill rattles, some on huge drums, whilst others played on instruments called marimbas, a kind of dulcimer made of two rows of different-sized gourds fastened in a frame, and struck by sticks with india-rubber balls at the end. To any but native ears the music was perfectly deafening.
Several flags and banners were carried m the procession, and amongst these was mixed up a number of long pikes, upon which were stuck the skulls of the various chiefs that Moené Loonga had conquered in battle.
As the king as helped out of his palanquin, the acclamations rose higher and higher from every quarter of the market place The soldiers attached to the caravans fired off their old guns, though the reports were almost too feeble to be heard above the noisy vociferations of the crowd; and the havildars rubbed their black noses with cinnabar powder, which they carried in bags, and prostrated themselves. Alvez advanced and presented the king with some fresh tobacco, "the appeasing herb," as it is called in the native dialect; and certainly Moené Loonga seemed to require some appeasing, as, for some unknown reason, he was in a thoroughly bad temper.
Coïmbra, Ibn Hamish and the dealers all came forward to pay their court to the monarch, the Arabs greeting him with the cry of marhaba, or welcome; others clapped their hands and bowed to the very ground; while some even smeared themselves with mud, in token of their most servile subjection.
But Moené Loonga scarcely took notice of any of them; he went staggering along, rolling like a ship upon a stormy sea, and made his way past the crowds of slaves, each of whom, no less than their masters, trembled lest he should think fit to claim them for his own.