The royal palace is (or was) a very large timber building, consisting of
a ground-floor and two stories, surmounted by a singularly high-pitched
roof. Each story is surrounded by a broad gallery. The roof is
supported on wooden pillars, eighty feet high, and rises forty feet above
them, resting in the centre on a pillar not less than a hundred and
twenty feet in height. All these columns are fashioned each from a
single trunk; and when it is considered, says our authority, that the
forests containing trees of sufficient size for this purpose lie fifty or
sixty miles from the capital, that the roads are nowhere paved, and in
some places are quite impassable, and that all the pillars are dragged to
the capital without the help of a beast of burden or any single machine,
and are afterwards wrought and set up with the simplest tools, the
erection of this palace may justly be called a gigantic undertaking, and
the palace itself ranked among the wonders of the world.
The government of Madagascar has always been Draconian in its severity,
and the penalty exacted for almost every offence is blood. Some of the
unfortunates are burned; others are hurled over a high rock; others
buried alive; others scalded to death with boiling water; others killed
with the spear; others sewn up alive in mats, and left to perish of
hunger and corruption; and others beheaded.
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