In addition, the rich soil grew such legumens and cereals as they required. The rivers, lakes, and marshes swarmed with fish. Cattle throve. Goats, sheep, and fowls were abundant. Bark cloth from the fig-trees and carefully dressed skins provided the clothing they were so scrupulous to wear; for they shuddered at open indecency, and yet led the most licentious lives, licentiousness then paying no penalty in the spread of malignant diseases. This would be the way in which the average Muganda might look back on the past. Of course there was another side to the picture, no doubt. The paradisaical, unmoral lives of easy indulgence in their banana groves ill fitted them in the long run to cope with the attacks of stronger races. Fate led them under the British ægis after the country had been brought to something like ruin by ten years of civil war, and ten years of wretched misgovernment at the hands of a wicked sovereign. Had the British Protectorate not been declared, it is futile to suppose the country could have retained its independence. It would have been annexed by Germany or France, have been added to the Congo Free State or to the Egyptian Sudan.[68] If by some miracle it had escaped any one of these masters, it would have fallen victim later on to the Abyssinian raiders of the present day. Speke found the country governed by a worshipped despot, Mutesa, who had just succeeded to a throne which had been in existence for something like four hundred and fifty years in an unbroken dynasty originally of Hima origin. This despot was a young man of agreeable countenance, with somewhat negroid features but a yellowish-brown skin. He had the large, liquid eyes characteristic of all the princes and princesses of this family. He lived in palaces which, though built of palm trunks, reeds, and grass were often imposing in appearance, with roofs rising to fifty feet above the ground. The interior of these dwellings had a raised floor of mud, hard as cement, and was divided into compartments by reed screens. The floor would be strewn with a soft carpet of fine fragrant grass, on which leopard skins and beautifully dressed ox-hides were laid down. The towns consisted mainly of collections of these straw-thatched dwellings surrounded by large gardens and banana groves, and fenced off from the outer world by tall reed fences so plaited as to produce an agreeably variegated aspect. Speke and his companion, and the Swahili porters with them, noticed the resemblance offered by this beautifully “tidy” country of Uganda to the civilised coast belt of Zanzibar. Negro savagery was far removed, especially in sanitary matters, where the arrangements were quite equal to those in force in England one hundred years ago. The religion of the country consisted of a worship paid to a large number of Ba-lubari or spirits, some of which were obviously ancestral, and others the personification of earth, air, or water