Through this doorway a passage, smoothly coated with chunam, and tinted red, opened into the _cour d’honneur_. On the right hand, just inside the door, stood a fetich niche, very like an exaggerated font for holy water. It contained the usual medley of rubbish—bones and sticks and teeth and roots and tangles of string; a lot of eggshells also, pierced and tied together. Opposite to this niche was a hollow in the wall, two steps above the ground, just long enough and broad enough for a man to lie; the quarters, doubtless, of a slave who kept the door. What I have termed the _cour d’honneur_ was a small quadrangle, unroofed, with alcoves much like boxes at a theatre on three of its sides. The middle one, that fronting the entrance, occupied the full breadth of the wall, saving a doorway that led through to the next court; the others were smaller. These boxes stood on a level, perhaps five feet above the floor of the yard. They had no way in from the back, but access was gained by steps from below, and the parapet, of mud and chunam, was cut away at that point. Wooden columns and arches, of Moorish design and color, marked the king’s box—that in the middle. They had hangings apparently, for pegs were there, and I found a silk “cloth” on the ground. It was not difficult, with our experience, to refill this courtyard with the pride and pomp and circumstance of Quisa royalty. There sat the king on his earthen bench, wrapped in a spotless robe of cotton, home-spun, and home-dyed in graceful patterns. His sandals, with a golden sole and little, solid, golden figures for ornament, rested on a patchwork carpet of silk. His arms were bare, but loaded with bracelets; some of the costly Aggry bead, some a bristling string of nuggets unworked. Arab charms, wrapped in small leather cases, sewn with gold, encircled his wrists and elbows and knees, and they dangled from the arch above. On the floor at either hand crouched a page, one holding his pipe, silver-bound, one his drinking calabash, mounted in gold and carved. Behind these favorites squatted the bearer of the toddy jar, Dutch earthenware, set in silver, and the drinking calabash, carved and bound in gold; of the silver-mounted stool and gun, the silver spittoon, and knives with silver hafts in a belt of leopard-skin—in short, the retinue essential to his majesty’s comfort. Nearest of all stood the executioner, with his four-handled sword of office, looking like a toy-stool of gold with a clumsy blade thrust through the seat. The royal councillors sat upon the cross-benches, and the smaller alcoves were occupied by wives and slaves, handsome enough, many of them, their lips full but not thick, their noses straight, their skins brown with a shade of gold. A mass of ornaments, in bullion or filagree, decked the long wool of these ladies, combed to all manner of fantastic shapes: eccentricity has no bounds in dealing with that stiff and elastic material, which grows to a surprising length amongst