Chapter Eleven.
Reveals Disco’s Opinions about Savages, and the Savages’ Opinions of Disco, and Other Weighty Matters.
As two or three of Harold’s people were not very well just at that time, he resolved to remain at Kambira’s village for a few days to give them rest, and afterwards to push on to the country of his friend Chimbolo.
This arrangement he came to the more readily that he was short of provisions, and Kambira told him that a particular part of the country near the shores of a lake not far distant abounded with game of all sorts.
To Disco Lillihammer he explained his plans next day, while that worthy, seated under the shade of a banyan-tree, was busily engaged with what he styled his “mornin’ dooties”—namely, the filling and smoking of his cutty-pipe.
“You see, Disco,” he said, “it won’t do to knock up the men with continuous travel, therefore I shall give them a spell of rest here. Kambira tells me that there is plenty of game, large and small, to be had not far off, so that we shall be able to replenish our stock of meat and perchance give the niggers a feast such as they have not been accustomed to of late, for it is not too much to expect that our rifles will do more execution, at all events among lions and elephants, than native spears. Besides, I wish to see something of the people, who, being what we may call pure out-and-out savages—”
“Savages!” interrupted Disco, removing his pipe, and pointing with the stem of it to the village on an eminence at the outskirts of which they were seated; “d’ee call them folk savages?”
Harold looked at the scene before him, and paused for a few moments; and well he might, for not fifty yards off the blacksmith was plying his work energetically, while a lad sat literally between a pair of native bellows, one of which he blew with his left hand, the other with his right and, beyond these, groups of men and women wrought at their primitive looms or tilled their vegetable gardens and patches of land.