Page:Two kings of Uganda.djvu/108

looked upon religion as an amusement and recreation, my readings about a great White Throne of Judgment, before which even kings were to stand, must have been most distasteful to the easy-going potentate. There was much that was good and loveable in him, but his education had been a training in cruelty, brutality, and lust. Such edicts as that every man was to wear a bead on his wrist, on pain of losing his head ; and every woman, a bead on a string round her waist, on pain of being cut in half ; such brutalities as shooting his wives, practised in his earlier days, and such vile obscenities as make daylight ashamed, which he caused to be performed in his open court, show that his training in these vices had born a plenteous crop of fearful crimes.

Some of his vilest abominations, I believe, he committed by the advice of the Arabs, but what was frequent and notorious in his unhappy successor, was seldom practised by himself. What a fearful picture was presented in reality in that gay and bright-looking palace of pleasure built upon its sunny hill !

Daily went up the terrible cries of unhappy victims, as they were deliberately hacked to pieces, with strips of reed, sharp enough to be used as knives, condemned very often for nothing, or merely for some breach of court etiquette. Frequently furnaces were smoking, in which the agonised bodies of persons, innocent of any crime, were writhing in slow torture, till death, more merciful than their tormentors, ended their anguish and despair. Sometimes scenes of hideous shame were