Two Egyptians, a corporal and a Cairo boy of fifteen, both light complexioned, were captured near Fort Bodo during my absence, and no one discovered what became of them. It is supposed they were made prisoners, like young Nassamonians of old. I have often wondered what was done to them, and what the feelings of both were--they were devout Mussulmans--after they were taken to the Wambutti’s camp. I fancy they must have been something similar to those of Robert Baker, a sailor, in 1562--
“If cannibals they be In kind, we do not know, But if they be, then welcome we, To pot straightway we goe. They naked goe likewise, For shame, we cannot so; We cannot live after their guise, Thus naked for to go. By roots and leaves they live, As beasts do in the wood: Among these heathen who can thrive, On this so wilde a food?”
One of the poisons employed by the tribes of the forest to smear their weapons, in order to make them more deadly, is a dark substance of the colour and consistency of pitch. It is supposed--if native women may be trusted--to be made out of a species of arum, a very common plant, with large leaves, found in any quantity between Fort Bodo and Indesura. Its smell, when fresh, reminds one of the old blister plaster. That it is deadly there can be no doubt. They kill the elephants and other big game with it, as certainly as these animals could be slain with bone-crushing rifles. That they do kill elephants is proved by the vast stores of ivory collected by Ugarrowwa, Kilonga-Longa, and Tippu-Tib, and each adult warrior has a waist-belt, or a shoulder-belt, to suspend his dagger and skinning-knife, and every mother who carries her child and every wife who carries a basket has need of broad forehead-straps, made out of buffalo hide, to bear her load on her back.
The poison is not permitted to be manufactured in a village. It seems to be a necessity, to prevent fatal accidents, that the poison should be prepared in the bush. It is then laid on the iron arrows thickly, and into the splints of the hard wooden arrows.
Another poison is of a pale gluey colour. At Avisibba we discovered several baskets of dried red ants among the rafters, and I conjectured, from their resemblance in colour to the deadly poison which the Avisibbas used, that it must have been made by crushing them into a fine powder, and mixing it with palm oil. If one of these insects can raise a blister on the skin of the size of a groat, what may not the powder of mummied insects of the same species effect? If this pale poison be of this material, one must confess that, in the forest, they possess endless supplies of other insects still worse, such as the long black ants which infest the trumpet tree, a bite from one of which can only be compared to cautery from a red hot iron. But whatever it be, we have great faith in a strong hypodermic injection of carbonate of ammonium, and it may be that stronger doses of morphia than any that I ventured upon might succeed in conquering the fatal tetanic spasms which followed every puncture and preceded death.
