"And for once the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment, on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps, for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really was a potential African despot. In the midst of my reflections I heard another newspaper phrase, 'Not long ago the rivers ran blood.' This was the Second, who was fond of stories inside comic supplements, and who was recalling a bygone 'atrocity,' I suppose. But it was curious to me, to notice how abruptly they all dropped the journalist jargon the moment they spoke of something they really understood. They regaled me with 'atrocities,' with 'rivers running blood' and 'gold in the forests that no white man had ever penetrated,' with 'power of life and death' and so on, but when I inquired anxiously what this omnipotent monarch had come aboard of us for, they replied without any hesitation, "'To get a drink.' "It seemed a contemptible diversion for a person inspiring such awe politically. I don't say, mind you, that such _was_ his object. My shipmates may have been as much in error about his motives as they were about his power. I was too tired, too full of aches and humiliations of my own, to investigate. He passed across my field of vision, and being the first of his kind, left an ineffaceable impression. The sun went down suddenly soon after, and the coppery glow vanished from the water, leaving it a grey blur.