Monday the 24th was a Black Monday, sultry and thundery.  We went to the bush, and once more we returned, disgusted by the chattering of the wild men.  As we discussed our plans for moving, Forteune threw cold water upon every proposal.  This puzzled me, and the difficulty was to draw his secret.  At last Kanga, a black youth, who, being one of the family, had attached himself uninvited to the party, blurted out in bad French that the Shekyani chief, to whose settlement we were bound, had left for the interior, and that the village women would not, or rather could not, give us “chop.”  This was a settler to my Mpongwe friends.  Nimrod, however, declared that some bushmen had lately seen several gorillas in the direction of Sanga-Tanga, two marches down coast from Mbata, and about half-way to Cape Lopez.  I did not believe a word of his intelligence; the direction is south-west instead of south-east, towards the sea instead of into the forest.  But it was evidently hopeless to seek for the “ole man” in these parts, and I had long been anxious to see Sanga-Tanga; we therefore agreed nem. con. to set out before dawn on the next day.

But the next day dawned, and the sun rose high, and the world was well heated and aired before the bushmen condescended to appear.  After a two hours’ battle with the sand-flies we set off at 7.35 A.M., Forteune, Hotaloya, and Kanga at the head of the musketeers, one of them also carrying an axe; sixteen guns form a strong party for these regions.  The viol (nchambi) was not allowed to hang mute in Mbata’s halls, this instrument or the drum must never be neglected in African travel; its melody at the halt and the camp-fire are to the negro what private theatricals are to the European sailor half fossilized in the frozen seas.  Our specimen was strung with thin cords made from the fibre of a lliana; I was shown this growth, which looked much like a convolvulus.  The people have a long list of instruments, and their music, though monotonous, is soft and plaintive:  Bowdich gives a specimen of it ("Sketch of Gaboon,” p. 449), and of a bard who seems to have been somewhat more frenzied than most poets.  Captain Allen (iii. 398) speaks of a harp at Bimbia (Camarones) tightly strung with the hard fibre of some creeping plant.  The Bakele harp (M. du Chaillu, chap, xvi.) is called Ngombi; the handle opposite the bow often has a carved face, and it might be a beginning of the article used by civilized Europe—­ Wales for instance.

The path plunged westward into the bush, spanned a dirty and grass-grown plantation of bananas, dived under thorn tunnels and arches of bush, and crossed six nullahs, Neropotamoi, then dry, but full of water on our return.  The ant-nests were those of Yoruba and the Mendi country; not the tall, steepled edifices built by the termites with yellow clay, as in Eastern Africa, but an eruption of blue-black, hard-dried mud and mucus, resembling the miniature pagodas, policeman’s lanterns, mushrooms, or umbrellas one or two feet