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He staggered, reeled, then made a short gallop; but the blood was spouting from the wound in a thick stream, and before he had gone 200 yards he came to a dead halt, with his ears drawn back, and allowed me to come within twenty yards of him, when, receiving a zinc bullet through the head, he fell dead. "Allah ho, akhbar!" cried Khamisi, my butcher, fervently. "This is meat, master!"
A kind word given to Chowpereh is sure to be reciprocated with a good deed. He is the strongest, the healthiest, the amiablest, the faithfulest of all. He is the embodiment of a good follower. Khamisi is a neat, cleanly boy of twenty, or thereabouts, active, loud-voiced, a boaster, and the cowardliest of the cowardly. He will steal at every opportunity.
While on this subject, I may as well give here a sketch of each of the principal men whose names must often appear in the following chapters. According to rank, they consist of Bombay, Mabruki Burton, Asmani the guide, Chowpereh, Ulimengo, Khamisi, Ambari, Jumah, Ferajji the cook, Maganga the Mnyamwezi, Selim the Arab boy, and youthful Kalulu a gunbearer.
Bombay, as ever comical, never so much at home as when in the dance of the Mrima, has my water-bucket on his head; Chowpereh the sturdy, the nimble, sure-footed Chowpereh has an axe in his hand, and wears a goatskin on his head; Baraka has my bearskin, and handles a spear; Mabruki, the "Bull-headed," has entered into the spirit of the thing, and steps up and down like a solemn elephant; Ulimengo has a gun, and is a fierce Drawcansir, and you would imagine he was about to do battle to a hundred thousand, so ferocious is he in appearance; Khamisi and Kamna are before the drummers, back to back, kicking up ambitiously at the stars; Asmani, the embodiment of giant strength, a towering Titan, has also a gun, with which he is dealing blows in the air, as if he were Thor, slaying myriads with his hammer.
During the afternoon, Uledi and Ferajji, who had been despatched after the truant Khamisi, returned with him and all the missing articles.
Ulimengo, the bold guide who had exulted in his weapons and in our numbers, and was so sanguine of victory, had performed the eleven hours' march in six hours; sturdy Chowpereh, whom I regarded as the faithfullest of my people, had arrived only half an hour later than Ulimengo; and frisky Khamisi, the dandy the orator the rampant demagogue yes he had come third; and Speke's "Faithfuls" had proved as cowardly as any poor "nigger" of them all.
Working myself into a fury,, I enumerated his sins to him; he had lost a goat at Muhalleh, he had permitted Khamisi to desert with valuable property at Imbiki; he had frequently shown culpable negligence in not looking after the donkeys, permitting them to be tied up at night without seeing that they had water, and in the mornings, when about to march, he preferred to sleep until 7 o'clock, rather than wake up early and saddle the donkeys, that we might start at 6 o'clock; he had shown of late great love for the fire, cowering like a bloodless man before it, torpid and apathetic; he had now lost the property-tent in the middle of the Masika season, by which carelessness the cloth bales would rot and become valueless; he had lost the axe which I should want at Ujiji to construct my boat; and finally, he had lost a pistol and hatchet, and a flaskful of the best powder.
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