The Discovery of the Source of the NileSpeke, John Hanning
History
The Discovery of the Source of the Nile
Speke, John Hanning
Africa, East -- Description and travel; Nile River; Nile River Valley -- Discovery and exploration; Uganda -- Description and travel
Baraka next, with a kind of natural influence of affinity when a row is
commenced, made himself so offensive to Bombay, as to send him running
to me so agitated with excitement that I thought him drunk. He seized my
hands, cried, and implored me to turn him off. What could this mean?
I could not divine; neither could he explain, further than that he had
come to a determination that I must send either him or Baraka to the
right-about; and his first idea was that he, and not Baraka, should be
the victim. Baraka's jealousy about his position had not struck me yet.
I called them both together and asked what quarrel they had, but could
not extract the truth. Baraka protested that he had never given, either
by word or deed, the slightest cause of rupture; he only desired the
prosperity of the march, and that peace should reign throughout the
camp; but Bombay was suspicious of him, and malignantly abused him, for
what reason Baraka could not tell. When I spoke of this to Bombay, like
a bird fascinated by the eye of a viper, he shrank before the slippery
tongue of his opponent, and could only say, "No, Sahib--oh no, that is
not it; you had better turn me off, for his tongue is so long, and mine
so short, you never will believe me." I tried to make them friends,
hoping it was merely a passing ill-wind which would soon blow over; but
before long the two disputants were tonguing it again, and I distinctly
heard Bombay ordering Baraka out of camp as he could not keep from
intermeddling, saying, which was true, he had invited him to join the
expedition, that his knowledge of Hindustani might be useful to us; he
was not wanted for any other purpose, and unless he was satisfied with
doing that alone, we would get on much better without him. To this
provocation Baraka mildly made the retort, "Pray don't put yourself in
a passion, nobody is hurting you, it is all in your own heart, which is
full of suspicions and jealousy without the slightest cause."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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