The Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul Page A

drains were exposed. This exposing of the drains was the Libyan style; the grand new mosque in Kampala had a similar feature.
    I would have liked to see more of the palace, but we were not able to do so. When I asked where we might rest we were led to the smaller, rectangular building on the other side of the gravelled area. In the drawing-room area there was an old leopard skin, mark of kingship—(poor leopard, doomed to extinction)—thrown over an upholstered chair. I imagined the young king sat there and discussed affairs of state with various people. There was another small room with two plain divan beds set against two walls, their heads at an angle one to the other. This was where we were supposed to rest. The lavatory had no seat; through a big hole in the ceiling we could see the beams and rafters of the roof. This was where James’s arrangements petered out; it was clear now that no amount of telephoning could improve matters.
    We dragged some chairs out to the wide verandah, and the warm air from the gravelled yard and from the road below came at us. Patrick telephoned James and said without complaint that Toro was beautiful, so beautiful he was hoping to be allowed to buy a piece of land. James,missing the irony, told us that if we wanted lunch we should go to the Mountains of the Moon hotel in the town. We decided to forget the palace officials—we had some idea that they might have laid on lunch for us—and make a run for this hotel. We heard later that the officials were hoping to come with us.
    In the Mountains of the Moon, new to me, we sat in the spacious back verandah, at the edge of the bright green lawn. A pretty little kitten, three or four months old, wailed piteously for food. I wished I could have taken him away with me. I went and talked to a waitress. She told me that the kitten was the last of a litter; they had got rid of the others. The kitten lived in a drain pipe in a concrete gutter; when it was there it was perfectly hidden. It was alone in the world; it kept alive—perhaps for not much longer—by its instinct. Hunger alone had made it come up to the back verandah. The waitress brought a saucer of milk. This little bit of nourishment comforted it; it stopped crying, and a little later I saw it in the hotel garden, not far from its drain-pipe home, licking its paws.
    It was not far from here, in the kingdom of Unyoro, to the west of Buganda, that Speke, near the end of his journey, bought a little kitten from an Unyoro man. He doesn’t say why he bought it, but it could only have been to keep the creature alive for a few more days. The Unyoro man wanted to eat the kitten; it was good eating, he said. He begged Speke to give the kitten back to him if it looked likely to die. It is a strange episode in his book, just four lines long; and he doesn’t say how it ended.
    There had been some talk from James of the palace officials taking us to see places and people connected with the traditional African religion. But since our arrival my interest in this part of the programme had gone down and down. And it was just as well, because when we went back from the Mountains of the Moon to the palace the red-eyed official, talking of the religious things we wanted to see, said they had sent away all their cars; and since we couldn’t all fit in Patrick’s ambassador’s car, they would have to go ahead of us on a
boda-boda
motorbike.That would cost three thousand shillings. It was only a pound, but in Ugandan shillings it sounded a fearful amount; and I dreaded to think, if we showed ourselves indifferent to money at this stage, how much we would have to pay later to have an audience with a local diviner.
    I said we were leaving out that part of the programme. They didn’t seem to mind. But they wanted us to sign the visitors’ book. They especially wanted Patrick to sign it, since he was the important man among us. And, since he was important, they wanted him to sign by himself on a whole