people came from the Kuss country in the west with sixteen tusks, and a great many slaves bought and not murdered for.  The river is rising fast, and bringing down large quantities of aquatic grass, duckweed, &c.  The water is a little darker in colour than at Cairo.  People remove and build their huts on the higher forest lands adjacent.  Many white birds (the paddy bird) appear, and one Ibis religiosa; they pass north.

The Bakuss live near Lomame; they were very civil and kind to the strangers, but refused passage into the country.  At my suggestion, the effect of a musket-shot was shown on a goat:  they thought it supernatural, looked up to the clouds, and offered to bring ivory to buy the charm that could draw lightning down.  When it was afterwards attempted to force a path, they darted aside on seeing the Banyamwezi’s followers putting the arrows into the bowstrings, but stood in mute amazement looking at the guns, which mowed them down in large numbers.  They thought that muskets were the insignia of chieftainship.  Their chiefs all go with a long straight staff of rattan, having a quantity of black medicine smeared on each end, and no weapons in their hands:  they imagined that the guns were carried as insignia of the same kind; some, jeering in the south, called them big tobacco-pipes; they have no fear on seeing a gun levelled at them.

They use large and very long spears very expertly in the long grass and forest of their country, and are terrible fellows among themselves, and when they become acquainted with firearms will be terrible to the strangers who now murder them.  The Manyuema say truly, “If it were not for your guns, not one of you would ever return to your country.”  The Bakuss cultivate more than the southern Manyuema, especially Pennisetum and dura, or Holeus sorghum; common coffee is abundant, and they use it, highly scented with vanilla, which must be fertilized by insects; they hand round cups of it after meals.  Pineapples too are abundant.  They bathe regularly twice a day:  their houses are of two storeys.  The women have rather compressed heads, but very pleasant countenances; and ancient Egyptian, round, wide-awake eyes.  Their numbers are prodigious; the country literally swarms with people, and a chief’s town extends upwards of a mile.  But little of the primeval forest remains.  Many large pools of standing water have to be crossed, but markets are held every eight or ten miles from each other, and to these the people come from far, for the market is as great an institution as shopping is with the civilized.  Illicit intercourse is punished by the whole of the offender’s family being enslaved.