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Every thing was perfectly clean; the bedsteads of iron, furnished with mosquito-curtains; and we were supplied immediately with every article that we required.
The reply to this was, that Kamrasi was very much pleased with my fatherly wisdom and advice, and would act up to it, allowing Budja only to approach with one woman; we need, however, be under no apprehensions, for Kamrasi's power was infinite; the Gani road should be opened even at the spear's point; he had been beating the big drum in honour of us the whole day; he would not allow any beggars to come and see us, for he wanted us all to himself, and for this reason had ordered a fence to be built all round our house; but he had got no present from Grant yet, though all he wanted was his mosquito-curtains, whilst he wished my picture-books to show his women, and he returned.
"I should like to see him at night-work," she said afterwards, when, very late, her Bingo appeared in the shadow of the conjugal mosquito-curtains. "You wouldn't," was her martial lord's reply. "Wouldn't what?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in tropical sleeping attire. Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied to her reflection in the looking-glass: "You wouldn't see him.
Sometimes Nestorius clambered on to the bed, when the mosquito-curtains were up, and rested from his labours a small curled-up form, looking very comfortable. And then, when his mother's soft voice called him, he was wont to gather up his belongings and take his departure.
The untidy khansamah the custodian of the rest-home hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed hung with torn mosquito-curtains.
The mosquito-curtains, I should say, were supported on four short poles stuck in the ground, on which rested four others, so that the whole arrangement looked like a long narrow box covered with fine muslin. Without these contrivances it is utterly impossible to sleep with any degree of comfort on the banks of the Magdalena, or indeed of most of the rivers in that part of the country.
The storekeeper was then called, and confirming the story of my men, I begged him to give me what was my own. It then turned out that it was all Petherick's, but he had orders to give me on account anything that I wanted. This being settled, I took ninety-five yards of the commonest stuff as a makeshift for mosquito-curtains for my men, besides four sailor's shirts for my head men.
The subject then turned upon medicine, and after inspecting the chest, and inquiring into all its contents, it ended by his begging for the half of everything. The mosquito-curtains were again asked for, and refused until I should leave this.
Notwithstanding this, we should have slept soundly enough had it not been for the mosquitoes, which hummed round our ears all night, darting down and running their trunks into every spot they could find exposed. It was a severe lesson, and reminded us that we must obtain mosquito-curtains to surround out beds at night, or we should be eaten up before we had performed half our voyage.
"I'll get some honest sleep to-night," he said as they parted, and ten minutes afterwards he was lying under his mosquito-curtains, oblivious to the world. Coryndon's servant, Shiraz, was squatting across the door that led into the veranda when his master came in, and he waited for his orders.
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