And so they plodded on, old Kintu and his wife, until, coming to where the Victoria Nyanza spreads its summer sea through four degrees of latitude, flecked with floating groves, “purple isles of Eden,” the patriarch halted, and, the first time for many years, laid down his staff upon the ground. And the mark of the staff may still be seen, eight cubits in length, lying like a deep scar across the basalt boulders piled up on the western shore of the great lake. And then his wife laid down her burden, the one banana and the one potato; and the goat and the cow lay down, for they were all weary with the journey of half a century, during which they had never rested night nor day. And the name they gave the land they stayed at was Uganda, but the name of the land they came from no one knows.
And then Kintu cut the banana and potato into many little pieces, and planted them, each piece twenty miles apart, and they grew so fast that the plant seemed to the eye to be crawling over the ground. And his wife had many sons and daughters, and they were all born adult, and intermarried, so that in a few years all the country was filled with people. The cow and the goat also brought forth adult offspring, and these multiplied so fast that in the second generation every man in the land had a thousand head of cattle. And Kintu was their king, and his people called him the Blameless Priest; for he wronged no one. In his land no blood was ever shed, for he had forbidden his people to eat meat, and when any sinned they were led away by their friends, the man with a woman, for a thousand miles, and left there with cuttings of the banana and the potato; for they never led any one away alone, lest he
