“Lungwa u telemene ko
Mwanza Ko Yellala o kwenda.”

“The boat that arrives at the Mwanza (the River) the same shall go up to the Yellala” (rapids).  It is part of a chant which the mothers of men now old taught them in childhood, and the sole reminiscence of the Congo Expedition, whose double boats, the Ajojos of the Brazil, struck their rude minds half a century ago.

These quitandas are attended by people living a dozen miles off, and they give names to the days, which consequently everywhere vary.  Thus at Boma Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday are respectively called “Nkenge,” “Sona,” “Kandu,” and “Konzo.”  This style of dividing time, which is common throughout Pagan West Africa, is commonly styled a week:  thus the Abbe Proyart tells us that the Loango week consists of four days, and that on the fourth the men “rest” by hunting and going to market.  Tuckey also recognizes the “week of four days,” opposed to the seven days’ week of the Gold Coast.

After half an hour’s run to the north-west my bearers, raising loud shouts of “Alii! vai sempre!” dashed into the market-place where about a hundred souls were assembled.  The women rose in terror from their baskets and piles of vendibles; some began hastily to pack up, others threw themselves into the bush.  Order was soon restored by the interpreter; both sexes and all ages crowded round me with hootings of wonder, and, when they had stared their fill, allowed me to sit down under a kind of ficus, not unlike the banyan-tree (Ficus Indica).  Tuckey (p. 181) says that this fig is planted in all market-places and is considered sacred; his people got into trouble by piling their muskets against one of them:  I heard of nothing of the kind.  The scanty supplies—­a few fowls, sun-dried fish, kola-nuts, beans, and red peppers—­were spread upon skins, or stored in well-worked baskets, an art carried to perfection in Africa; even the Somali Bedawin weave pots that will hold water.  The small change was represented by a medium which even Montesquieu would not set down as a certain mark of civilization.  The horse-shoe of Loggun (Denham and Clapperton), the Fan fleam, the “small piece of iron like an ace of spades on the upper Nile” (Baker), and the iron money of the brachycephalic Nyam-nyams described and drawn by Schwein furth (i. 279), here becomes a triangle or demi-square of bast-cloth, about 5 inches of max. length, fringed, coloured like a torchon after a month of kitchen use, and worth one-twentieth of the dollar or fathom of cloth.  These money-mats or coin-clouts are known to old travellers as Macuitas and Libonges (in Angolan Libangos).  Carli and Merolla make them equivalent to brass money; the former were grass-cloth a yard long, and ten = 100 reis; in 1694 they were changed at Angola for a small copper coin worth 2 1/2 d., and the change caused a disturbance for which five soldiers were shot.  Silver was represented by “Intagas,” thick cottons the size of