Yet, it is still here; oh! yes,
I carry it with me to this day, and now that I have grown thin I can
feel it with my finger."
I listened astonished to this harangue, which if it meant anything,
meant that we had all met before, in Africa at some time when men used
matchlocks that were fired with a fuse--that is to say, about the year
1700, or earlier. Reflection, however, showed me the interpretation of
this nonsense. Obviously this old priest's forefather, or, if one put
him at a hundred and twenty years of age, and I am sure that he was
not a day less, perhaps his father, as a young man, was mixed up with
some of the first Europeans who penetrated to the interior of Africa.
Probably these were Portuguese, of whom one may have been a priest and
the other two an elderly man and his son, or young brother, or
companion. The manner of the deaths of these people and of what
happened to them generally would of course be remembered by the
descendants of the chief or head medicine-man of the tribe.
"Where did we meet, and when, O Motombo?" I asked.
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