Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 1).djvu/280

 *spired our traveller with astonishment. It happening to be market-day, the streets were crowded with people, who, being little accustomed to strangers, and having never before seen a negro, crowded obstreperously around the travellers, and followed them with hooting, shouting, and clamour to their lodgings. An old man, who had officiously undertaken to provide them with an apartment, conducted them through the mob of his townsfolk, which was every moment becoming more dense, to a small mud hut, situated in a deserted part of the city, and from its dismal and miserable appearance, rather resembling the den of a wild beast than a human dwelling. Having entered this new cave of Trophonius, and shut the door behind them, the travellers, as Kæmpfer jocosely observes, began to offer up their thanks to the tutelary god of the place, for affording them an asylum from the insolence of the rabble. But their triumph was premature. The mob, whose curiosity was by no means to be satisfied with a passing glance, ascended the roof of the den in crowds, and before the travellers could spread out their carpets and lie down, the crashing roof, the lattices broken, and the door, which they had fastened with a beam, violently battered, warned them that it was necessary to escape before they should be overwhelmed by the ruins. It was now thought advisable that they should endeavour, by exhibiting themselves and their Ethiopian interpreter, whom the Bakuares unquestionably mistook for some near relation of the devil's, to conciliate their persecutors, and purchase the privilege of sleeping in peace. They therefore removed the beam, and issuing forth, Abyssinian and all, into the midst of the crowd, allowed them time to gaze until they were tired. Presently after this the governor of the city arrived; but, instead of affording his protection to the strangers, as a man in his station should have done, he accused them of being spies, and having overwhelmed them