Iron ore is dug out of the hills, and its manufacture is the staple trade of the southern highlands.  Each village has its smelting-house, its charcoal-burners, and blacksmiths.  They make good axes, spears, needles, arrowheads, bracelets and anklets, which, considering the entire absence of machinery, are sold at surprisingly low rates; a hoe over two pounds in weight is exchanged for calico of about the value of fourpence.  In villages near Lake Shirwa and elsewhere, the inhabitants enter pretty largely into the manufacture of crockery, or pottery, making by hand all sorts of cooking, water, and grain pots, which they ornament with plumbago found in the hills.  Some find employment in weaving neat baskets from split bamboos, and others collect the fibre of the buaze, which grows abundantly on the hills, and make it into fish-nets.  These they either use themselves, or exchange with the fishermen on the river or lakes for dried fish and salt.  A great deal of native trade is carried on between the villages, by means of barter in tobacco, salt, dried fish, skins, and iron.  Many of the men are intelligent-looking, with well-shaped heads, agreeable faces, and high foreheads.  We soon learned to forget colour, and we frequently saw countenances resembling those of white people we had known in England, which brought back the looks of forgotten ones vividly before the mind.  The men take a good deal of pride in the arrangement of their hair; the varieties of style are endless.  One trains his long locks till they take the admired form of the buffalo’s horns; others prefer to let their hair hang in a thick coil down their backs, like that animal’s tail; while another wears it in twisted cords, which, stiffened by fillets of the inner bark of a tree wound spirally round each curl, radiate from the head in all directions.  Some have it hanging all round the shoulders in large masses; others shave it off altogether.  Many shave part of it into ornamental figures, in which the fancy of the barber crops out conspicuously.  About as many dandies run to seed among the blacks as among the whites.  The Man ganja adorn their bodies extravagantly, wearing rings on their fingers and thumbs, besides throatlets, bracelets, and anklets of brass, copper, or iron.  But the most wonderful of ornaments, if such it may be called, is the pelele, or upper-lip ring of the women.  The middle of the upper lip of the girls is pierced close to the septum of the nose, and a small pin inserted to prevent the puncture closing up.  After it has healed, the pin is taken out and a larger one is pressed into its place, and so on successively for weeks, and months, and years.  The process of increasing the size of the lip goes on till its capacity becomes so great that a ring of two inches diameter can be introduced with ease.  All the highland women wear the pelele, and it is common on the Upper and Lower Shire.  The poorer classes make them of hollow or of solid