“Probably he does not,” replied Pereira, “and probably the indemnity will never be paid. Perhaps,” he added with a dry smile, “your judicious Government never intended it to be paid. A debt that cannot be met is sometimes of great use to the creditor.” “Then you think that the king of Ashanti doesn’t possess sixty thousand ounces?” “Who knows?” replied Pereira, deliberately rolling a cigarette. “One hears wonderful stories of the store of gold in the Royal Treasury at Bantamá, but then no one has seen it, and an African’s idea of a large sum is so different from that of a rich European Government.” He lighted his cigarette and stared absently at a gecko that was creeping stealthily along the ceiling towards a corpulent black moth. “It is probable,” he remarked presently, after blowing a cloud of smoke up towards the unconscious gecko, “that there are really large hoards of gold scattered about the country, but these are not available for the king’s use.” “How is that?” I asked. “Why, you see, among the African tribes the custom exists of making over certain treasures to particular fetishes. Here a rich gold mine is shut down and given to one fetish; here a river that has alluvial gold in its bed is made sacred to another fetish; here a mountain containing a rich vein of quartz is ‘busum’--sacred; here a temple has a hoard of gold raised from the sacred mine, or washed from the sacred river. If you travel in the interior you will constantly meet with fetish mountains--you can see one, the Adáklu mountain, from this verandah on a clear day--and every river of any size that you cross is sacred to some fetish or other; and probably nearly all those rivers and mountains are rich in gold.” “It is a curious custom,” I remarked. “Not so very unlike our own,” the old man replied, with a dry smile, that spread out a fan of wrinkles on either temple; “think of the South American churches that your countrymen looted; think of the shrines in my own poor country, and think of the fetish treasures that your king Henry laid his strong hands upon. No, Englefield, man is much the same all the world over--love, war, greed, and superstition are the forces that move him, whether his skin be white, black, red or yellow, and whether his house is in the frozen North or the sunny Tropics.” I was amused at this philosophic outburst on the part of my host, who, having delivered himself of these truths, resumed his abstracted observation of the gecko. That reptile, having captured the moth, proceeded to devour it, scattering fragments of its wings down on to the table; after which it suddenly started in pursuit of another gecko, presumably a female, which had made its appearance on the ceiling. Pereira nodded at the lizard. “See, Englefield,” he said, “even the little house-master is no different. He has his business to attend to like us, and now that he has filled his belly, he finds leisure to attend to the affairs of his cold little heart.”