With
him they were enabled to hold discourse, partly by signs, and partly by
means of an old and highly polished negro, who had been the rat-catcher
at the factory now consumed; and the conclusion, or perhaps the
confusion, arrived at from signs, grunts, grins, nods, waggings of
fingers and twistings of toes, translated grandiloquently into broken
English, was not far from being to the following effect:
To wit, that two great kings reigned inland, either of them able to eat
up Hunko Jum and Bandeliah at a mouthful, but both of them too proud to
set foot upon land that was flat, or in water that was salt. They ruled
over two great nations called the Houlas, and the Quackwas, going out of
sight among great rivers and lands with clear water standing over them.
And if the white men could not understand this, it was because they
drank salt-water.
Moreover, they said that of these two kings, the king of the Houlas was
a woman, the most beautiful ever seen in all the world, and able to
jump over any man's head. But the king of the Quackwas was a man, and
although he had more than two thousand wives, and was taller by a
joint of a bamboo than Bandeliah--whose stature was at least six feet
four--yet nothing would be of any use to him, unless he could come to an
agreement with Mabonga, the queen of the Houlas, to split a durra straw
with him. But Mabonga was coy, and understanding men, as well as jumping
over them, would grant them no other favour than the acceptance of their
presents.
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