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Updated: June 6, 2025
Imagination is the first fruit of civilization and when the reverend fathers of the coast taught Bosambo certain magics, they were also implanting in him the ability to picture possibilities, and shape from his knowledge of human affairs the eventual consequences of his actions. This is imagination somewhat elaborately and clumsily defined.
The last passage was in his own native tongue and Bosambo beamed. "Yes, sah!" said he in the English of the Coast. "I be Bosambo, good chap, fine chap; you, sah, you look um you see um Bosambo!" He slapped his chest and Bones unbent. "Look here, old sport," he said affably: "what the dooce is all this shindy about hey?"
Hamilton nodded again, and stuck out his jaw in troubled meditation. "I am a sick man," he said, "and I must rest, sending Tibbetti to watch the river, because the crops are good and there is fish for all men, and because the people are prosperous, for, Bosambo, in such times there is much boastfulness, and the tribes are ripe for foolish deeds deserving to appear wonderful in the eyes of woman."
He went aft to recover his nerve, and returned to become an unseen spectator to a purely domestic scene, for Bones had immersed the squalling infant in his own india-rubber bath, and was gingerly cleaning him with a mop. Hamilton of the Houssas coming down to headquarters met Bosambo by appointment at the junction of the rivers.
He spoke in English, and Bosambo, resisting the temptation to retort in an alien tongue, and realizing perhaps that he would need all the strength of his more extensive vocabulary to convince his hearer, continued in Bomongo: "Now I tell you," he went on solemnly, "if Sandi had come, Sandi, who loves me better than his brother, and who knew my father and lived with him for many years, and if Sandi spoke to me, saying 'Tell me, O Bosambo, where is N'bosini? I answer 'Lord, there are things which are written and which I know cannot be told, not even to you whom I love so dearly." He paused.
"I thank all my little gods you have come, my lord," said he, humbly; "for in the night one of my young men saw an Isisi army coming against us." "Where is the army?" demanded a weary Bosambo. "Lord, it has not come," said N'gori, glibly; "for hearing of your lordship and your swift canoes, I think it had run away." Bosambo's force paddled back to the Ochori city the next day.
"So men call me, Bosambo," said he carelessly "though my lord M'ilitani does not know this therefore in the day when M'ilitani comes, speak of me as M'wani-m'wani that he may know of whom men speak when they say 'the sleepless one." Everybody knows that Cala cala great chiefs had stored against the hour of their need certain stocks of ivory.
Two nights after, the call was repeated this time with greater detail. An N'gombi force of countless spears had seized the village of Doozani and was threatening the capital. Again Bosambo carried his spears to a killing, and again was met by an apologetic N'gori.
M'gani, with only a cloak of leopard skin about him, twirling two long spears as he walked, was silent till he came to the edge of the city where he was to take farewell of his host. "Tell me this, Bosambo, where are Sandi's spies that I may avoid them?" And Bosambo, without hesitation, told him.
She was stripped to the waist, stood behind the Stone of Death as though it were a counter, and the two squirming infants under her hands were so much saleable stock: "Here we bring terror to all who hate us, for one of these is the heart of Bosambo and the other is more than the heart of the-man-who-stands-for-Sandi " "O woman!"
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