deserters, and when I had gone off to Lake Bangweolo with only four attendants, the rest wished to follow, but he dissuaded them by saying that I had gone into a country where there was war:  he was the direct cause of all my difficulties with these liberated slaves, but judged by the East African Moslem standard, as he ought to be, and not by ours, he isa very good man, and I did not think it prudent to come to a rupture with the old blackguard.

“Laba” means in the Manyuema dialect “medicine;” a charm, “boganga:”  this would make Lualaba mean the River of Medicine or charms.  Hassani thought that it meant “great,” because it seemed to mean flowing greatly or grandly.

Casembe caught all the slaves that escaped from Mohamad, and placed them in charge of Fungafunga; so there is little hope for fugitive slaves so long as Casembe lives:  this act is to the Arabs very good:  he is very sensible, and upright besides.

3rd November, 1870.—­Got a Kondohondo, the large double-billed Hornbill (the Buceros cristata), Kakomira, of the Shire, and the Sassassa of Bambarre.  It is good eating, and has fat of an orange tinge, like that of the zebra; I keep the bill to make a spoon of it.

An ambassador at Stamboul or Constantinople was shown a hornbill spoon, and asked if it were really the bill of the Phoenix.  He replied that he did not know, but he had a friend in London who knew all these sort of things, so the Turkish ambassador in London brought the spoon to Professor Owen.  He observed something in the divergences of the fibres of the horn which he knew before, and went off into the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and brought a preserved specimen of this very bird.  “God is great—­God is great,” said the Turk, “this is the Phoenix of which we have heard so often.”  I heard the Professor tell this at a dinner of the London Hunterian Society in 1857.

There is no great chief in Manyuema or Balegga; all are petty headmen, each of whom considers himself a chief:  it is the ethnic state, with no cohesion between the different portions of the tribe.  Murder cannot be punished except by a war, in which many fall, and the feud is made worse, and transmitted to their descendants.

The heathen philosophers were content with mere guesses at the future of the soul.  The elder prophets were content with the Divine support in life and in death.  The later prophets advance further, as Isaiah:  “Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise.  Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust:  for thy dew is as the dew of herbs.  The earth also shall cast out her dead.”  This, taken with the sublime spectacle of Hades in the fourteenth chapter, seems a forecast of the future, but Jesus instructed Mary and her sister and Lazarus; and Martha without hesitation spoke of the resurrection at the last day as a familiar doctrine, far in advance of the Mosaic law in which she had been reared.