218 THE AMAZON SIMILAR TO UGANDA. 
Nile went to Misr (Egypt). The men and women 
killed daily by a blow on the back of the head are cut 
in pieces by knives made from the common reed ; the 
pieces are then put into a cloth, and thrown to the 
birds ; Masoongo, the head executioner, reserving for 
himself all their hearts! Speke had saved the lives 
of four or five people. If a man is seen being led 
away with his hands tied in front, he is marked for 
execution — if they are tied behind, he is under sen- 
tence of a fine/' 
We shall by-and-by see whether this gossip, brought 
me by the Seedees, had any truth in it. And it may 
not be uninteresting to mention here, that at a private 
audience given me by his Holiness the Pope in 1864, 
when I submitted to him a map of our route, explain- 
ing the general configuration of the country upon the 
equator, he remarked with animation, that my de- 
scription tallied with what he had observed in the 
country of the Amazon, where he had passed many 
years of his life as a missionary, — a fact I had not 
known before. The Amazon is in the same parallel of 
latitude as Uganda. 
