a tall, swarthy Arab in long, flowing robes,
followed by negro-bearers, who cast on the ground bales of cloth and
guns. The Arab wore on his head a red fez, round which a coloured
turban scarf was wound. He was a slave-trader from the coast, who
had come from the East to M'tesa in Uganda to buy men and women and
children to carry them away into slavery.

King M'tesa was himself not only a slave-trader but a slave-raider.
He sent his fierce gangs of warriors out to raid a tribe away in the
hills to the north. They would dash into a village, slay the men,
and drag the boys and girls and women back to M'tesa as slaves. The
bronze-skinned boy, Lugalama, was a young slave who had been captured
on one of these bloodthirsty raids. And M'tesa, who often sent out
his executioners to slay his own people by the hundred to please the
dreaded and horrible god of small-pox, would also sell his people by
the hundred to get guns for his soldiers.

The Arab slave-trader bowed to the earth before King M'tesa, who
signalled to him to speak.

"I have come," said the Arab, pointing to the guns on the floor,
"to bring you these things in exchange for some men and women and
children. See, I offer you guns and percussion caps and cloth." And he
spread out lengths of the red cloth, and held out one of the guns with
its gleaming barrel.

King M'tesa's eyes lighted up with desire as he saw the muskets and
the ammunition. These, he thought, are the things that will make me
powerful against my enemies.

"I will give you," the Arab slave-trader went on, "one of these
lengths of red cloth in exchange for one man to be sold to me as
a slave; one of these guns for two men; and one hundred of these
percussion caps for a woman as a slave."

Mackay looked into the cruel face of M'tesa, and he could see how the
ambitious King longed for the guns. Should he risk the favour of the
King by fighting the battle of a few slaves? Yet Mackay remembered as
he sat there, how Livingstone's great fight against the slave-traders
had made him, as a student, vow that he too would go out and fight
slavery in Africa. The memory nerved him for the fight he was now to
make.

Mackay turned to M'tesa and said words like these:[55]

"O King M'tesa, you are set as father over all your multitude of
people. They are your children. It is they who make you a great King.

"Remember, O King, that the Sultan of Zanzibar himself has signed a
decree that no slaves shall be ta