RELIGIOUS MENDICANTS.

297

less under the operation of having his portrait taken. In contrast to this dwarf the king had a sort of giant of

amazing size and power, though not more than six feet high. He was employed in carrying messages, and would go through all the motions of a warlike attack, wielding his spear with grace and agility, struggling with the supposed enemy, planting his foot triumphantly on the dead body, snorting, and finishing up by wiping his spearhead upon the grass to free it from the imaginary blood.

A class of mendicants or gentle beggars, called Bandwa, allied to the Wichwézi, were spread over all these kingdoms. They adorned themselves with more trinkets than any other caste, and generally carried in their hands an ornamented tree-creeper. Many of their women looked handsome when dressed in parti-coloured skins, and wearing a small turban of black cloth. One man wore from the crown of his head down his back the skin of a tippet

298

HABITS AND CUSTOMS.

monkey, to which he had attached the horns of an antelope. They wandered singing from house to house, and were occasionally very importunate. A set of them, who seemed to possess cattle, lived near the camp in Unyoro. The natives respected them as religious devotees, and never refused them food. They were not exactly a hereditary caste, and admitted new members to their body by certain ceremonies. One of them held the rank of a captain in the army. There was a tradition that the whole country had once been occupied by this people, but that the greater number disappeared underground.

The Wanyoro were but poorly armed. They had no bows and arrows, and the spear was small and weak, with a thin six-foot shaft of ordinary wood. Bead ornaments round the neck were worn by the wealthier classes; others wore flattened pellets, larger than garden pease, made of polished iron or ivory, strung round the ankles. The huts were wretched, but this was partly in consequence of the absence of wood; and most of those seen by the expedition were only temporary habitations. Their floors were never swept, but bedded with grass, which, when it became soiled, was never removed, but left to rot, and overlaid with fresh grass, so that vermin of every description swarmed. The fields were chiefly cultivated by women with the hoe. No fruit of any kind was grown near the palace. Coffee was brought from Uddu, and the vegetables grown on the spot were the same as those observed in the last countries they had passed; but the deficiency of plantains was severely felt in the fare of the people. Cowries were the chief currency, two hundred of them buying a small bag of flour. The king used to send them a kind of beer, made from millet, which tasted like the dregs of a cask.

The great resort for the loungers and newsmongers

NATIVE SUPERSTITIONS.

299

was the blacksmith's shop, an awning made of the stalks of sorghum. One lad sat on the ground and blew a double-handed and double-nosed bellows, the air through which passed through a detached tube upon the live charcoal. Two men, almost naked, squatted hammering, talking, and smoking at the same time. Their anvil was a flat boulder, and the hammers bolts of iron, the shape of large chisels. The amusements of the people were few, but the Seedis remarked that the dancing was superior to what they had been used to see at Zanzibar. The nights were often enlivened by soft-sounding duets from the harmonicum and drum played across the river.

Superstitions were rife among the people, from the king downwards. Some of Kamrasi's warriors stole some straw from a thatched house occupied by one of his enemies, in order that the owners, who lived miles away, might be subject to the supernatural powers which the king's foreign guests were supposed to exercise. When the rain-gauge disappeared one night, the king sent a one-eyed man with a cow's horn in his hand to detect the thief. The horn was capped with a rag of bark, and had an iron bell tinkling at the top. It was shaken roughly in the face of each of the Seedis as they sat down. All seemed to change colour at the suspicion, and the wizard proceeded to the spot whence the gauge had been taken. He found it lying a short way off, and the tracks of a hyena showed who had been the real culprit; but the general belief in the "black art" was not shaken.

Though snakes were not common, wooden charms were worn round the ankle as a preservative against their bites. At cross roads a dead frog or fowl was often placed, or, if the family was rich enough, a goat. The animals were split open, with some plucked grass beside

300

GLOWWORMS AND FIREFLIES.

them, being laid there for the purpose of curing some sick person. Speke was told that a Myoro woman, who bore twins that died, kept two small pots in her house as effigies of the children, into which she milked herself every evening, continuing the practice for the usual five months of suckling, in order that the spirits of the dead should not persecute her. There appears to be a similar custom among some North American Indian tribes. The children themselves were buried in an earthenware beerpot, turned mouth downwards, and placed in the jungle under a tree. In Unyanyémbe, in the case of the death of one twin, the mother ties a gourd to her neck as proxy, and puts into it a sample of everything she gives the surviving child, to avoid the consequences of the dead one being jealous. But if both twins die, they are thrown into water to avert public calamities. Moreover, in the sister-province of Ngura, all living twins were said to be thus sacrificed.

There was a singular belief current that Kamrasi, if he liked, could divide the waters of the lake, which Grant thought might be some dark tradition of the Mosaic miracle. The abundant rain which fell during their monotonous residence was felt as a relief, as it gave them employment in reading the rain-gauge; and at night the insects were interesting, especially a sort of glowworm half an inch long, seen among the roots of grasses. If placed on the hand or sleeve, it travelled quickly, throwing out a flickering light at shorter intervals than the firefly, which also abounded.

CHAPTER VI.

UNYORO TO EGYPT.

66

THE NILE AND ITS FLOATING ISLANDS-THE DISTRICT OF CHOPI-THE KARUMA FALLS-PASSAGE OF THE WILDERNESS OF KIDI-THE GANI-THE CAMP OF THE ELEPHANT-HUNTERS-MAHAMED AND HIS RAGGED REGIMENT -FALORO-THE MADI-MIANI'S NAME ON A TREE AT APUDDO-SPORTING ADVENTURES-MARCH THROUGH THE BARI-HOSTILE DEMONSTRATIONS-GONDOKORO-MEETING WITH SIR SAMUEL BAKER-VOYAGE DOWN THE NILE TO EGYPT, AND RETURN TO ENGLAND.

It was delightful to feel, as they dropped down the Kafu in their canoe, that, with the exception of a few cataracts and rapids, there was now communication by water all the way to England. The Kafu was about broad enough for two "gigs" to race abreast in; there were seldom landing-places, and the view was screened out by rushes. At its mouth they entered an immense canoe, and found themselves in what at first appeared a long lake, averaging from two hundred yards broad at first to a thousand before the day's journey ended. This was the Nile. Grant saw it for the first time, but Speke had made its acquaintance at Urondogani and the Ripon Falls. Both sides were fringed with the huge papyrus rush. The left was low and swampy, while the right rose from the water in a gently sloping bank, covered with trees and festoons of beautiful convolvuli. In some parts the river was so