in Mtésa's later years deprived these ceremonials of the primitive dignity which characterized them in the days of Speke and Grant, the innovations appear to have been accepted by the people as great marks of progress and evidences of the increased wisdom and power of the monarch. Explorers are all agreed as to the element of personal dignity which Mtésa threw into the discharge of his duties, which, to those who had as keen a sense of the ludicrous as Captain Speke was possessed of, was sometimes very amusing. The king's gait in retiring [says Captain Speke] was intended to be very majestic, but did not succeed in conveying to me that impression. It was the traditional walk of his race, founded on the step of the lion; but the outward sweep of the legs, intended to represent the stride of the noble beast, appeared to me only to realize a very ludicrous kind of waddle, which made me ask Bombay if any. thing serious was the matter with the royal person. Stanley found him to be "a tall, cleanfaced, large-eyed, nervous-looking man, clad in a tarbush black robe, with a white shirt belted with gold; " and greater familiarity with Europeans had rendered him less exacting in insisting upon homage from them than he had been with Speke the first white man whom he had ever seen. His imperiousness, however, with regard to his own power, remained undiminished. A comparison of the accounts given of the kingdom of Uganda by Speke with those of Stanley, lead to the conclusion that the twelve or thirteen years that had intervened between their two visits had been actively employed by Mtésa in consolidating his power and extending his dominion. In addition to his one hundred and twenty-five thousand soldiers, the king was able to put upon the Victoria Nyanza a fleet of five hundred war-canoes, capable of floating a force of from sixteen to twenty thousand men. If we roughly multiply these figures by ten, we may estimate the population over which Mtésa had supreme power at a million of souls. His territory extended twenty to fifty miles inland from the lake; and he levied tribute and acknowledgments of supremacy far beyond these limits. So that this king, at whom the world has only been able to obtain infrequent though interesting glances, was no insignificant chieftain, when we reflect that he reigned over so large a proportion of the population of the globe. The name of Mtésa will be remembered more in connection with the history of African exploration than with reference to his wars and conquests; although, rather by accident than intentionally, he has done more service to the cause of African exploration than any other prince of the interior. He, like his father, had invited strangers from the south to enter his country, provided they had sufficient property to barter with; but from the Egyptian side of Uganda the route was closed, and trade there was none, till, after much persuasion from Speke, he opened the way between Zanzibar and Egypt - for Mtésa held the golden key of this line- and we thus have learnt the source and course of the Nile through him and him alone. After he had made the acquaintance of Speke and Grant, he never ceased to render assistance to white travellers most notably to Baker and Stanley, who have frankly acknowledged his services in their works; and throughout the tribes of his lake country Europeans have never had to invoke the name and influence of Mtésa in vain. Not a single European has been killed in his kingdom before or since 1862, when he first had the acuteness to make friends with the English. He tolerated and befriended missionaries of all sects; he sent an embassy to Queen Victoria; and, above all, he trained his people by rigid discipline to respect his guests, and to obey his government. A remarkable man, whose natural abilities, though of the most primitive and barbaric order, were sufficiently striking and strong enough to attract the regard of nineteenth-century civilization. We have yet to learn how Mtésa's death befell. Was he murdered? Did he die in battle? We think neither. It is more probable that he died from a malady which has afflicted. him for the past ten years a malady which Mr. Felkin, the physician who attended him a few years ago, has told us he might have cured without danger had the chieftains permitted him to make an operation. Africans are known to submit to amputations and incisions when performed by one of their own race; yet in this case the chiefs did not accept Mr. Felkin's advice, and preferred to allow their king to linger in pain, lose his nerve, and die from a malady which European skill would in all probability have overcome. The chiefs, however, must be absolved from blame : they knew no better, and they loved their king dearly. With the disappearance of the most | herb of the land, and all the fruit of the interesting of African monarchs, the ques- trees, so that there remained not any tion arises upon whose shoulders the green thing in the trees or in the herbs royal mantle of Uganda is to fall. As to of the field, through all the land of Egypt. his successor we have no information; Well did the servants of Pharaoh know and can only hope that the chiefs will the dread meaning of the threatened show as much discrimination as when plague, when they pleaded with the king they chose Mtésa for their ruler. The to spare his land this grievous destruction. future of the interesting country of the African lakes, the prosecution of further exploration, the opening up of central Africa to commerce, the establishment of civilized institutions, and it may be of colonial enterprise, are all largely bound up in the character of the ruler who is to come after King Mtésa. As, in those days of old, the Syrian locusts "ran upon the wall, climbed up upon the houses, and entered in at the windows like a thief," so, in later days, travellers in northern Africa have witnessed locust swarms which they compare to clouds of dense smoke, darkening the sun so that its brightest rays could cast no shadow, and which, alighting on some green crop, have devoured every blade in the field, and, marching onwards, have climbed trees, walls, and houses, seeking what they might devour, and sometimes consuming the very bark of trees and shrubs. Six hundred years after the exodus this same locust plague is the scourge whereby the Israelites themselves are punished; and God himself speaks of "the locust, the canker-worm, the caterpillar, and the palmer-worm" as "my great army which From The Nineteenth Century. THE LOCUST WAR IN CYPRUS. FROM our earliest years we have all been familar with Eastern tales in which the locust figures as the destroying angel; the overwhelming invading army which advances with irresistible might, with a sound"like the noise of chariots on the mountains-like the noise of a flame of I sent among you." fire that devoureth the stubble." Onward In after ages Mahommed taught the they march in dense columns, ravaging whole provinces, as in the days when the Hebrew prophet described their withering advance. "A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth. The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, nothing shall escape them." Again and again they figure in Holy Writ as the recognized symbol of a divinely appointed scourge. Hence, in the book of Revelation, in enumerating the successive woes that are to come upon the earth at the blast of the seven trumpets by the seven angels, the armies of winged warriors who were wafted to earth by the smoke from the bottomless pit are described as locusts, to whom commandment was given that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any trees, but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. Except in degree, it was no unique calamity which befell the land of Egypt, when the Lord bade the east wind to blow from Ethiopia, and bring the locusts which went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all its coasts, covering the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened, and the very houses were filled with them, and they did eat every Arabians specially to recognize the divine will in their sufferings from the ravages of these insects. He describes a locust as endowed with speech, and it declares of its species, "We are the army of the great God; we produce ninety-nine eggs; if the hundred were complete we should consume the whole earth and all that is in it." And sorely have these locust hordes fulfilled their mission of destruction in all the coasts of Syria and Arabia. Nor has Europe been exempt. From time to time the great army of locusts has appeared in one country or another in such appalling force as to render the visitation an historical calamity. Such was the plague of locusts which appeared in Russia in the year 1650, and thence overspread Poland and Lithuania in multitudes so incalculable that the damage sustained by these countries was beyond reckoning; the surface of the country seemed as if covered with a black cloth; the very trees bent beneath their weight; and when at length the locusts had lived their little span, the earth was in many places covered to the depth of four feet with their corpses. Even in the south of France, rewards are occasionally offered for the collection of locusts' eggs, while the live insects are caught wholesale by sweeping the ground with stout cloths, and so collecting them in sacks for destruction. to the nearest water to wash, and then returns to the fray with renewed vigor. In the middle of last century they made Another deadly foe is the grub of the their appearance in Spain, and for four bee-fly, which feeds on the locusts' years they ravaged the land. First estab-eggs; and there is also a parasite which lishing themselves in the remote and un-attacks the living insect. cultivated districts of Estremadura, they Lady Anne Blunt tells us how in norththence overran La Mancha and Portugal, and the fertile provinces of Andalusia, Murcia, and Valencia. As they advanced, the rustling of so many millions of wings sounded like the trees of a forest shaken by the wind. They formed a cloud so dense as to darken the sunlight, and moved on steadily, against the wind, in columns which sometimes extended for a couple of leagues. With unerring instinct they sought out every fruitful garden, every green field, sparing nothing with one exception, namely, the love-apple,* which they would in no case touch. ern Arabia she rode through flocks of ravens and buzzards sitting on the ground gorged with locusts. The camels munched them up with their provender. Her greyhounds ran snapping after them all day long, eating as many as they could catch; and, on examining the stomach of a hyena shot by her husband, it was found to be full of locusts and gazelle. She says the Bedouins often give them to their horses, and at the time of her visit to Arabia many tribes had no food whatever but locusts and camel's milk. I have heard disgust expressed by some persons at the idea of classing lo All other green things were alike de- custs as an article of diet; they even voured. (In China they are said to spare cavil at the simple statement that locusts, the millet crops. If they do so, I suspect with wild honey, formed the staple food it can only be when the hardness of the of St. John the Baptist when in the wil ripe grain defies their attacks.) Garden derness, and deem it necessary to prove fruits and herbs, aromatic plants, rose that he was supplied with pods of the mary, thyme, lavender, mustard-seed, gar- carob tree, which we happen to call locust lic, onions, the caustic crowfoot, the bitter bean. The simple fact is, that locusts rue and wormwood, deadly nightshade were not only a recognized article of diet and hemlock no matter what the plant, in Syria, but were honored by a special it all served as food for the locusts. Even permit in that Levitical law concerning the woollen and linen clothes of the peas-diet, which appears to us so strangely ants, which were laid out to dry on the ground, seemed dainty morsels to these omnivorous invaders; nor did they spare the Church for in at least one instance (at Almaden) they devoured the silk garments that adorned the images of the saints, not sparing even the varnish on the altars. Indeed, though naturally vegetarians, locusts are apparently not always averse to animal food, or even to cannibalism; they have often been ob served to fight one with another, and the victor has been seen to feast upon the slain. Happily their foes are many. Frogs, lizards and serpents, owls, eagles, buzzards, bustards, hawks, ravens, desertlarks, wheat-ears, and other carnivorous and insectivorous birds do their best to diminish the locusts, but with small results. In Smyrna and other parts of Asia Minor the russet starling seems possessed with an insatiable desire to kill locusts, not for food, but for sheer sport. It goes on killing till its beak becomes so clogged with locust juice that it has to fly arbitrary in some of its prohibitions. The same law which rigidly excluded turbot in common with all manner of scaleless fish, and which would on no account tolerate the use of hares, coneys, ham or pork, honors the locust with a special recognition. "Even these ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle (or chargoli.e., a kind of locust) after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind." To the present day, in Arabia, in Madagascar, and many parts of northern Africa, they are preserved for food, and are even recognized as a commercial article of export. In some cases they are only sun-dried, in others they are preserved in brine. In Tunis the Moors fry them in oil or butter, and offer them for sale in the streets. In Medina and Tayf there are regular locust shops, where they are sold by measure. In Syria they are only eaten by the Bedouin Arabs and by very poor people. They are thrown alive into boiling water, with salt, then taken * Bombylidæ. out, dried in the sun, their heads, wings, and legs are torn off, and they are then packed in sacks for future use. Lady Anne mentions them as being a regular portion of the day's provision in camp. When first she tasted them, in December, she pronounced them fairly good, but by February she had decided that they were an excellent article of diet, the red locusts being better eating than the green ones. She was uncertain whether the red are the females and the green the males, or whether all were at first green, and became red as they advanced in age. It seems probable, how ever, that she is describing two distinct varieties, known in Cyprus as the large green vrouchos and the still larger lightbrown scarnos. Their flavor is more like that of green wheat than of either fish or flesh, and in the daily rations they were considered in a measure to take the place of vegetables. After trying various methods of cooking it was voted that they were best when plain boiled; their long legs were then pulled off, and they were held by the wings, dipped into salt, and so eaten with much relish. They are large, handsome insects, very like grasshoppers, but three inches in length, or four inches measuring from the head to the tip of the closed wings. The best time to catch them is in the morning, when they are half-benumbed by the chill of night, and their wings are damp with dew, so that they cannot fly. Then they lie thickly clustered under every bush that can afford them shelter, and can easily be captured and shovelled into baskets. But when the sun has warmed the earth and dried their wings, they are all on the alert, and spring away at the approach of the hunter, who nevertheless can often strike them down with sticks as they fly. On December 31 Lady Anne records that the previous night had been so cold that all the locusts were dead, and the small birds of the desert were holding high festival. I myself have seen considerable numbers of locusts winging their flight across the Red Sea, from Arabia towards Egypt. Many fell on the deck of the vessel in which I was sailing. At another time, when crossing the Himalayas, overlooking the valley of the Sutledge, I remarked a tremulous appearance in the atmosphere, as of a mirage. On further investigation, I ascertained that this strange quivering was produced by the glancing of light on the myriad wings of a great swarm of locusts, which were passing over the valley like a cloud. But those glimpses of the locust hosts were as nothing compared with the vast flights described by my brother Roualeyn, in the interior of South Africa.* He was standing in the middle of an immense plain when he first noticed their approach. On they came, like a snowstorm, flying slow and steady, about a hundred yards from the ground. He stood looking at them until the air was darkened with their masses, while the plain on which he stood became densely covered with them. Far as the eye could reach-east, west, north, south - they stretched in one unbroken cloud, and more than an hour elapsed before their devastating legions had swept by. Not long afterwards he fell in with another swarm. He was marching through a heavy, sandy country of boundless level plains, covered with rank, yellow grass, varied with detached clumps of thorny mimosas. He came upon a swarm of locusts, which had alighted to rest for the night on the grass and bushes. They lay so thick that they covered the large bushes, just as a swarm of young bees covers the branch on which it pitches. He could easily have collected enough to fill all his large wagons, the piercing cold of night, with white hoarfrost, having ren. dered them unable to take wing until the sun should restore their powers. He met a party of natives carrying heavy burdens of them on their backs, and his hungry dogs made a fine feast of those they captured for themselves. Having some difficulty at that time in procuring sufficient food for all his dogs, this locust swarm proved a most valuable addition to the larder. He took a large blanket and spread it under a bush, the branches of which were bent to the ground with the mass of locusts which covered it, and, having shaken the bush, there fell on to the blanket more locusts than he could possibly carry. These he roasted for himself, his servants, and his dogs. He found that they were highly prized by the natives of South Africa, as affording fattening and wholesome food to man, birds, and all sorts of beasts cows and horses, lions, jackals, hyenas, antelopes, elephants, etc., devour them. The following morning, soon after sunrise, he looked back, and saw the locusts A Hunter's Life in South Africa By R. Gordon Cumming. stretching to the west in vast clouds resembling smoke; but soon afterwards the wind, veering round, brought them back towards him, and they flew over his head, actually darkening the sun for a considerable period. still more intimate acquaintance with these gentle destroyers. He was living at 'Abeîh, on Mount Lebanon, when an alarm was raised that incalculable swarms of young locusts were marching up the valley towards the village. The inhabiEqually wonderful is the account of a tants turned out to endeavor, if possible, locust invasion of Syria, as related by Dr. to turn aside their line of march. This William Thomson. He tells how, in the they soon found to be altogether futile. early spring, a flying squadron - the pio- The whole face of the mountain was neers of the vast army-passed over the black with the closely serried ranks, land, leaving it thickly sown with their which advanced steadily like a well-discieggs, lying in little masses, cemented to- plined army. They were at the wingless gether, scattered all over fields, plain, and stage, and of the size of average grassdesert ground. This done, these harbin-hoppers. Nothing checked their steady gers of woe vanished; but within a couple onward progress. Trenches were dug, of months the very dust seemed to fires were kindled, thousands were slain. awaken to life and to creep. Soon these infinitesimal moving atoms developed into minute grasshoppers, who began their destructive existence, all moving forward in one general direction, a creeping, jumping mass of living particles. Dr. Thomson describes his first glimpse of this phenomenon. He was riding near Fûlîyeh, when it struck him that the side of a hill had a peculiar appearance. Riding up to it, to his amazement, the whole surface became agitated, and began to roll downwards. His horse was so frightened that he had to dismount. Then he perceived that this animated dust was composed of myriads of minute locusts, so young that they could not even jump; but in their infantile alarm they rolled over and over, producing an effect like the movement of fluid mortar. On another occasion he rode through a district where the work of extirpation was going on. It was near the Plain of Acre, and a swarm of locusts had overrun the whole region. The governor of Kabûl had summoned every man, woman, and child in the neighborhood to lend their aid in the common cause. The foe had not yet grown their wings and, being unable to fly, were compelled to run in whatever direction they were driven. So the people formed a vast circle, beating the bushes, and shouting, in order to frighten the insect host and drive them towards an isolated hill covered with dry grass. Soon the hill became black with the countless myriads which thronged it. Then the grass was set on fire in different places, and the flames, fanned by a strong breeze, soon spread over the whole hill, filling the air with an overpowering smell of roast locust. The same operation was performed at many different points in the neighborhood with very excellent results. Some years later Dr. Thomson made a Still fresh hordes pressed on in bewildering multitudes. Right up the mountain they advanced, scaling rocks and walls, hedges and ditches, the corpses of the slain only serving as bridges to facilitate the progress of the new-comers. Even when the foremost ranks reached the palace of the emir they did not turn aside to avoid its walls, but climbed straight up and went over the other side. Thus they scaled every house in the town, always going straight ahead, regardless of all obstacles. If it be true, as the saying goes, that "straightforward makes the best runner" in life, we might, perchance, find worse examples than the locusts. Hoping at least to be able to protect his own little garden, Dr. Thomson hired a number of laborers to keep up fires, and to remain on watch, beating the locusts off the walls with branches of trees. For some hours this struggle was kept up; but as the irresistible army continued to advance in ever-increasing multitude, they gave up the effort in despair, and surrendered to the conquerors. For four days did this gigantic "march past" continue, till at length a diminution in their numbers was apparent, and at last there remained only a few stragglers. But alas! for the change in the aspect of the land, which before their approach had been as a pleasant garden, but was now scorched as though the breath of a furnace had passed over it. Large vineyards which had been loaded with young grapes, orchards of olive, fig, and mulberry trees, all promising an abundant harvest, were left clean bare not a cluster of fruit, not a green leaf remaining, only melancholy naked branches. Vegetable gardens that had been green as a meadow were left bare as a dusty road, whole fields of tall corn were stripped of every leaf, and only naked stalks remained to mock the unhappy hus |