The Central African native is untrained either to express himself or to see pictorially. We have been so trained since the building blocks of our infancy, so that a photograph of a scene is to us an exact replica of that scene in miniature. As a matter of fact, it is only an arbitrary and conventional arrangement of black and white. A raw native sees nothing more than that even in a portrait of him self.
So Cazi Moto went at this task absolutely unequipped both of brain and of hand. In addition the label was rather difficult. The printed body of it contained the firm name of the chemists and their address; the drug itself was written, Kingozi remembered with exasperation, in his own not very legible script.
"Dashed fool!" he told himself aloud in his usual habit. "Deserve what you've got. Ought to have segregated the drugs--ought to have printed the labels--no use thinking of that now."
Cazi Moto worked painstakingly, his shrewd and wizened face puckered in absorption. He accomplished a legible Borroughs & Wellcome after many trials. Then he proceeded with the script. It seemed impossible to make a start; he did not even begin at the beginning, but was inclined to view the work as an entity and to begin drawing it at the top of the middle. Kingozi corrected that. At last the white man's fingers made out distinctly a capital M. He erased it with a sweep of the hand.
"That part of the barua again," he ordered.
After a time Cazi Moto repeated the feat.
"Once more."
This was quicker.
Kingozi dropped that bottle into his side pocket with a sigh of relief.
"Evidently the morphine," he said. "We'll try it again later to be sure. Wish I didn't scribble such a rotten hand. My capital As and Ps are something alike."