kind of town-hall found in almost all West-African villages.  A large fire was burning in it, on the ground; and at one end of the shed stood a huge wooden idol, painted red and white, and rudely fashioned in the shape of a woman.  The shed was the largest building in the village, for it was ten feet high, and measured fifteen feet by ten.  It is the habit of the lazy negroes of these interior villages—­at least, the men—­to spend almost the whole day lying down under the palaver-shed, feeding their morbid imaginations with tales of witchcraft, and smoking their condoquais.”

But all the villages of these poor children of the desert are not so untidy as the one described above.  There is a wide difference in the sanitary laws governing these villages.

“The Ishogo villages are large.  Indeed, what most strikes the traveller in coming from the seacoast to this inland country, is the large size, neatness, and beauty of the villages.  They generally have about one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty huts, arranged in streets, which are very broad and kept remarkably clean.  Each house has a door of wood which is painted in fanciful designs with red, white, and black.  One pattern struck me as simple and effective; it was a number of black spots margined with white, painted in regular rows on a red ground.  But my readers must not run away with the idea that the doors are like those of the houses of civilized people; they are seldom more than two feet and a half high.  The door of my house was just twenty-seven inches high.  It is fortunate that I am a short man, otherwise it would have been hard exercise to go in and out of my lodgings.  The planks of which the doors are made are cut with great labor by native axes out of trunks of trees, one trunk seldom yielding more than one good plank.  My hut, an average-sized dwelling, was twenty feet long and eight feet broad.  It was divided into three rooms or compartments, the middle one, into which the door opened, being a little larger than the other two....  Mokenga is a beautiful village, containing about one hundred and sixty houses; they were the largest dwellings I had yet seen on the journey.  The village was surrounded by a dense grove of plantain-trees, many of which had to be supported by poles, on account of the weight of the enormous bunches of plantains they bore.  Little groves of lime-trees were scattered everywhere, and the limes, like so much golden fruit, looked beautiful amidst the dark foliage that surrounded them.  Tall, towering palm-trees were scattered here and there.  Above and behind the village was the dark green forest.  The street was the broadest I ever saw in Africa; one part of it was about one hundred yards broad, and not a blade of grass could be seen in it.  The Sycobii were building their nests everywhere, and made a deafening noise, for there were thousands and thousands of these little sociable birds."[69]