a musical bellows called an accordeon.  He sent us some poor, well-watered Msamba (palm toddy), and presently he appeared, a fat, good-natured man, as usual, ridiculously habited.  He took the first opportunity of curtly saying in better Portuguese than usual, “There is no more march to-day!” This was rather too much for a somewhat testy traveller, when he changed his tone, begged me not to embroil him with a powerful neighbour, and promised that we should set out that evening.  He at once sent for provisions, fowls, and a small river-fish, sugar-cane, and a fine bunch of S. Thome bananas.

About noon appeared Chico Furano, son of the late Chico de Ouro, in his quality of “English linguister;” a low position to which want of “savvy” has reduced him.  His studies of our tongue are represented by an eternal “Yes!” his wits by the negative; he boasts of knowing how to “tratar com o branco” and, declining to bargain, he robs double.  He is a short, small, dark man with mountaineer legs, a frightful psora, and an inveterate habit of drink.  He saluted his superior, Nelongo, with immense ceremony, dating probably from the palmy times of the Mwani-Congo.  Equals squat before one another, and shaking hands crosswise clap palms.  Chico Furano kneels, places both “ferients” upon the earth and touches his nose-tip; he then traces three ground-crosses with the Jovian finger; again touches his nose; beats his “volae” on the dust, and draws them along the cheeks; then he bends down, applying firstly the right, secondly the left face side, and lastly the palms and dorsa of the hands to mother earth.  Both superior and inferior end with the Sakila or batta-palmas,[FN#26] three bouts of three claps in the best of time separated by the shortest of pauses, and lastly a “tiger” of four claps.  The ceremony is more elaborate than the “wallowings” and dust-shovellings described by Ibn Batuta at the Asiatic courts, by Jobson at Tenda,by Chapperton at Oyo,by Denham amongst the Mesgows, and by travellers to Dahome and to the Cazembe.  Yet the system is virtually the same in these distant kingdoms, which do not know one another’s names.

Chico Furano brought a Mundongo slave, a fine specimen of humanity, some six feet high, weighing perhaps thirteen stone, all bone and muscle, willing and hard-working, looking upon the Congo men as if they were women or children.  He spoke a few words of Portuguese, and with the master’s assistance I was able to catechize him.  He did not deny that his people were “papagentes,” but he declared that they confined the practice to slain enemies.  He told a number of classical tales about double men, attached, not like the Siamese twins, but dos-a-dos; of tribes whose feet acted as parasols, the Plinian Sciapodae and the Persian Tasmeh-pa, and of mermen who live and sleep in the inner waters—­I also heard this from M. Parrot, a palpable believer.  He described his journey down the great river, and declared that beyond his country’s frontier