22nd September, 1869.—­Moenekuss died lately, and left his two sons to fill his place.  Moenembagg is the elder of the two, and the most sensible, and the spokesman on all important occasions, but his younger brother, Moenemgoi, is the chief, the centre of authority.  They showed symptoms of suspicion, and Mohamad performed the ceremony of mixing blood, which is simply making a small incision on the forearm of each person, and then mixing the bloods, and making declarations of friendship.  Moenembagg said, “Your people must not steal, we never do,” which is true:  blood in a small quantity was then conveyed from one to the other by a fig-leaf.  “No stealing of fowls or of men,” said the chief:  “Catch the thief and bring him to me, one who steals a person is a pig,” said Mohamad.  Stealing, however, began on our side, a slave purloining a fowl, so they had good reason to enjoin honesty on us!  They think that we have come to kill them:  we light on them as if from another world:  no letters come to tell who we are, or what we want.  We cannot conceive their state of isolation and helplessness, with nothing to trust to but their charms and idols—­both being bits of wood.  I got a large beetle hung up before an idol in the idol house of a deserted and burned village; the guardian was there, but the village destroyed.

I presented the two brothers with two table cloths, four bunches of beads, and one string of neck-beads; they were well satisfied.

A wood here when burned emits a horrid faecal smell, and one would think the camp polluted if one fire was made of it.  I had a house built for me because the village huts are inconvenient, low in roof, and low doorways; the men build them, and help to cultivate the soil, but the women have to keep them well filled with firewood and supplied with water.  They carry the wood, and almost everything else in large baskets, hung to the shoulders, like the Edinburgh fishwives.  A man made a long loud prayer to Mulungu last night after dark for rain.

The sons of Moenekuss have but little of their father’s power, but they try to behave to strangers as he did.  All our people are in terror of the Manyema, or Manyuema, man-eating fame:  a woman’s child had crept into a quiet corner of the hut to eat a banana—­she could not find him, and at once concluded that the Manyuema had kidnapped him to eat him, and with a yell she ran through the camp and screamed at the top of her shrill voice, “Oh, the Manyuema have stolen my child to make meat of him!  Oh, my child eaten—­oh, oh!”

26th-28th September, 1869.—­A Lunda slave-girl was sent off to be sold for a tusk, but the Manyuema don’t want slaves, as we were told in Lunda, for they are generally thieves, and otherwise bad characters.  It is now clouded over and preparing for rain, when sun comes overhead.  Small-pox comes every three or four years, and kills many of the people.  A soko alive was believed to be a good charm for rain; so one was caught, and the captor had the ends of two fingers and toes bitten off.  The soko or gorillah always tries to bite off these parts, and has been known to overpower a young man and leave him without the ends of fingers and toes.  I saw the nest of one:  it is a poor contrivance; no more architectural skill shown than in the nest of our Cushat dove.