The maitre d’hotel again approached Prince Fyodor.
“Highness, there is some one at the door who I do not think should be admitted.”
“I will see him.”
But as he turned to the door, the newcomer appeared. He was a towering negro in full gala dress; on his head a lion’s mane busby; on his shoulders a shapeless fur mantle; a red satin skirt; brass bangles and a necklace of lion’s teeth; a long, ornamental sword hung at his side; two bandoliers of brass cartridges circled his great girth; he had small blood-shot eyes and a touzle of black wool over his cheeks and chin. Behind him stood six unsteady slaves carrying antiquated riflles.
It was one of the backwoods peers, the Earl of Ngumo, feudal overlord of some five hundred square miles of impenetrable highland territory. He had occupied himself throughout the civil war in an attempt to mobilise his tribesmen. The battle of Ukaka occurring before the levy was complete, saved him the embarrassment of declaring himself for either combatant. He had therefore left his men in the hills and marched down with a few hundred personal attendants to pay his respects to the victorious side. His celebrations had lasted for some days already and had left some mark upon even his rugged constitution.
Prince Fyodor hurried forward. “The tables are all engaged. I regret very much that there is no room. We are full up.”
The Earl blinked dully and said, “I will have a table, some gin and some women and some raw camels’ meat for my men outside.”
“But there is no table free.”
“Do not be put out. That is a simple matter. I have some soldiers with me who will quickly find room.”
The band had stopped playing and a hush fell on the crowded restaurant. Scared faces under the pa-per hats and false noses.
“Under the table, Black Bitch,” said Connolly. “There’s going to be a rough house.”
Mr. Youkoumian’s plump back disappeared through the service door.
“Now what’s happening?” said the British Minister. “Some one’s up to something I’ll be bound.”
But at that moment the Earl’s bovine gaze moving up the rows of scared faces to its natural focus among the palms and bunting, reached the Emperor. His hand fell to the jewelled hilt of his sword—and twenty hands in various parts of the room felt for pistols and bottle necks—a yard of tarnished dam-ascene flashed into the light and with a roar of hom-I49 age he sank to his knees in the centre of the polished floor.
Seth rose and folded his hands in the traditional gesture of welcome.
“Peace be upon your house, Earl.”
The vassal rose and Prince Fyodor’s perplexities were solved by the departure of the royal party.
“I will have that table,” said the Earl, pointing to the vacated box.
And soon, quite unconscious of the alarm he had caused, with a bottle of M. Youkoumian’s gin before him, and a vast black cheroot between his teeth, the magnate was pacifically winking at the ladies as they danced past him.
Outside the royal chauffeur was asleep and only with difficulty could be awakened. The sky was ablaze with stars; dust hung in the cool air, frag-rant as crushed herbs; from the Ngumo camp, out of sight below the eucalyptus trees, came the thin smoke of burning dung and the pulse and throb of the hand drummers. Seth drove back alone to the black litter of palace buildings.
“Insupportable barbarians,” he thought. “I am sure that the English lords do not behave in that way before their King. Even my loyalest officers are ruffians and buffoons. If I had one man by me whom I could trust… a man of progress and culture…”
SIX WEEKS PASSED
SIX weeks passed. The victorious army slowly demobolised and dispersed over the hills in a hundred ragged companies; livestock and women in front, warriors behind laden with alarm clocks and nondescript hardware looted in the bazaars; soldiers of Progress and the New Age home-ward bound to the villages.
The bustle subsided and the streets of Matodi resumed their accustomed calm; copra, cloves, mangoes and khat; azan and angelus; old women with obdurate donkeys; trays of pastry black with flies, shrill voices in the mission school reciting the cate-chism; lepers and pedlars, and Arab gentlemen with shabby gamps decently parading the water front at the close of day. In the derelict van outside the railway station, a patient black family repaired the ravages of invasion with a careful architecture of mud, twigs, rag and flattened petrol tins.
Two mail ships outward bound from Marseilles, three on the home journey from Madagascar and Indo-China paused for their normal six hours in the little bay. Four times the train puffed up from Ma-todi to Debra-Dowa; palm belt, lava fields, bush and upland; thin cattle scattered over the sparse fields; shallow furrows in the brittle earth; white-gowned Azanian ploughboys scratching up furrows with wooden ploughs; conical grass roofs in stockades of euphorbia and cactus; columns of smoke from the tukal fires, pencil-drawn against the clear sky.
Vernacular hymns in the tin-roofed missions, ancient liturgy in the murky Nestorian sanctuaries; tonsure and turban, hand drums and innumerable jingling bells of debased silver. And beyond the hills on the low Wanda coast where no liners called, and the jungle stretched unbroken to the sea, other more ancient rites and another knowledge furtively encompassed; green, sunless paths; forbidden ways un-guarded save for a wisp of grass plaited between two stumps, ways of death and initiation, the forbidden places of juju and the masked dancers; the drums of the Wanda throbbing in sunless, forbidden places.
Fanfare and sennet; tattoo of kettle drums; tri-colour bunting strung from window to window across the Boulevard Amurath, from Levantine cafe to Hindu drug store; Seth in his Citroen drove to lay the foundation stone of the Imperial Institute of Hygiene; brass band of the Imperial army raised the dust of main street. Floreat Azania.
FIVE
ON the south side of the Palace Compound, between the kitchen and the stockade, lay a large irregular space where the oxen were slaughtered for the public banquets. A minor gallows stood there which was used for such
