Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 3 by James Grant

The firing proved a mistake -- the result of a false alarm -- so the night passed without any other _alerte_ or disturbance, and all remained quiet during the temporary halt at Prahsu; but the troops heard of many strange things as occurring at Coomassie, all deemed by the natives portentous of its coming fate.

In its market-place -- that scene of daily blood and murder -- where the predecessor of King Koffee devoted three thousand victims 'to water the grave' of his mother -- an aërolite fell, to the terror of the people; but there came still a greater prodigy. A child was born which instantly began to converse, and, to prevent it having intercourse with supernatural visitors, it was placed alone in a room under guards, who in the morning found that it had vanished, and that nothing lay in its place but a bundle of withered bones; and on this the fetish men argued 'that Coomassie itself would pass away, and nothing remain thereof but dead leaves; ' and on the same day and hour that Lieutenant Grant of the 6th -- the first white man -- crossed the Prah, there sprang up a mighty tornado, that levelled the great tree under which the king used to sit, surrounded by his warriors. This caused a profound sensation among the Ashantees, who gathered by thousands around it in the market-place, which at that time was described by one who saw it as 'a den of reeking corpses, shrieking and tortured victims -- men and women butchered by hundreds -- where skulls and human bones lay about as oyster-shells do at home!'