To which compliment he replied: "If friendship is your desire, what would you say if I showed you a road by which you might reach your home in a month?"
I knew he referred to the direct line to Zanzibar across the Masai. He afterwards sent a page with this message:
"The king hopes you will not be offended if required to sit on it—a bundle of grass—before him, for no person in Uganda, however high in office, is ever allowed to sit upon anything raised above the ground but the king."
To this I agreed, and afterwards had many interviews with his queen, fair, fat and forty-five, to whom I administered medicine and found her the key to any influence with the king. She often sat chattering, laughing and smoking her pipe in concert with me.
I found that Mtésa was always on the look-out for presents, and set his heart upon having my compass. I told him he might as well put my eyes out and ask me to walk home as take away that little instrument, which could be of no use to him as he could not read or understand it. But this only excited his cupidity. He watched it twirling round and pointing to the north and looked and begged again until tired of his importunities, I told him I must wait until the Usoga Road was open before I could part with it, and then the compass would be nothing to what I would give him. Hearing this, he reared his head proudly, and patting his heart, said:
"That is all on my shoulders, as sure as I live it shall be done. For that country has no king and I have long been desirous of taking it."
I declined, however, to give him the instrument on the security of this promise, and he went to breakfast.
I had a brilliant instance of the capricious restlessness and self-willedness of this despotic monarch Mtésa. He sent word that he had started for N'yanza and wished me to follow. But N'yanza merely means a piece of water, and no one knew where he meant or what project was on foot. I walked rapidly through gardens, over hills and across rushy swamps down the west flank of the Murchison creek, and found the king with his Wakungu in front and women behind like a confused pack of hounds. He had first, it seems, mingled a little business with pleasure, for, finding a woman tied for some offence, he took the executioner's duty, and by firing killed her outright.
It will be kept in view that the hanging about at this court and all the perplexing and irritating negotiations had always one end in view—that of reaching the Nile, where it pours out of the N'yanza as I was long certain that it did.
Without the consent, and even the aid, of this capricious barbarian I was now talking to, such a project was hopeless. I thought that whilst I could be employed in inspecting the river and in feeling the route by water to Gani, Grant could return to Karagué by water, bring up our rear traps, and in navigating the lake obtain the information he had been frustrated in getting before.