Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 4.djvu/478

450 drunk very copiously. The patients were numerous, and the floor of the room received all the evacuations. It was most prodigiously hot, and the horrid, black figures, moaning and groaning with sickness all around me, gave me, I think, some slight idea of the punishment in the world below. My mortifications, however, did not stop here. I observed that, in coming into their presence, the queens were all covered with cotton shirts; but no sooner did their complaints make part of our conversation, than, to my utmost surprise, each of them, in her turn, stript herself entirely naked, laying her cotton shirt loosely on her lap as she sat cross-legged like a tailor. The custom of going naked in these warm countries abolishes all delicacy concerning it. I could not but observe that the breasts of each of them reached the length of their knees.

exceeding confidence on their part, they thought merited some consideration on mine; and it was not without great astonishment that I heard the queen desire to see me in the like dishabille in which she had spontaneously put herself. The whole court of female attendants flocked to the spectacle. Refusal, or resistance, were in vain. I was surrounded with fifty or sixty women, all equal in stature and strength to myself. The whole of my cloathing was, like theirs, a long loose shirt of blue Surat cotton cloth, reaching from the neck down to the feet. The only terms I could possibly, and that with great difficulty, make for myself were, that they should be contented to strip me no farther than the shoulders and breast. Upon seeing the whiteness of my skin, they gave all a loud cry in token of dislike, and shuddered, seeming to consider it rather the effects of disease than natural. I think in my