Each village had placed its human sacrifice in the middle of the path, for the purpose of affrighting the conquerors. The sacrifice was of either sex, sometimes a young man, sometimes a woman. The head, severed from the body, was turned to meet the advancing army, the body was evenly laid out with the feet towards Coomassie. This meant, no doubt, ‘Regard this face, white man, ye whose feet are hurrying on to our capital, and learn the fate awaiting you.’ * * * * * Coomassie is a town insulated by a deadly swamp. A thick jungly forest--so dense that the sun seldom pierced the foliage; so sickly that the strongest fell victims to the malaria it cherished--surrounded it to a depth of about one hundred and forty miles seaward, and one hundred miles to the north; many hundred miles east and west. Through this forest and swamp, unrelieved by any novelty or a single pretty landscape, the British Army had to march one hundred and forty miles, leaving numbers stricken down by fever and dysentery--the terrible allies of the Ashantee King with his one hundred thousand warriors. Stanley, speaking of Coomassie, writes:-- * * * * * The grove, which was but a continuation of the tall forest we had travelled through, penetrated as far as the great market-place. A narrow foot-path led into this grove, where the foul smells became suffocating. After some thirty paces we arrived before the dreadful scene, but it was almost impossible to stop longer than to take a general view of the great Golgotha. We saw some thirty or forty decapitated bodies in the last stages of corruption, and countless skulls, which lay piled in heaps, and scattered over a wide extent. The stoutest heart and the most stoical mind might have been appalled. At the rate of a thousand victims a year, it would be no exaggeration to say, that over one hundred and twenty thousand people must have been slain for ‘custom,’ since Ashantee became a kingdom. * * * * * Lord Wolseley wrote: ‘Their capital was a charnel-house; their religion a combination of cruelty and treachery; their policy the natural outcome of their religion.’ Terms of submission were imposed on King Coffee, and the force returned to the coast. Stanley writes of Lord Wolseley:-- * * * * * He has done his best, and his best has been a mixture of untiring energy and determination; youthful ardour, toned down by the sense of his grave responsibilities, excellent good-nature, which nothing seems to damp; excessive amiability, by which we are all benefitted; wise forethought, which, assisted by his devotion to work, proves that the trust reposed in him by the British Government will not be betrayed. * * * * *