Quitting the creeper-bound sand, we crossed a black and fetid mire, and struck inland to a higher and drier level.  The vegetation was that of the Calumbo road, but not so utterly sunburnt:  there were dwarf fields of Manioc and Thur (Cajanus indicus), and the large wild cotton shrubs showed balls of shortish fibre.  As we passed a euphorbia-hedged settlement, Kizuli ya Mu, “Seabeach Village,” a troop of women and girls, noisy as those of Ugogo, charged us at full gallop:  a few silver bits caused prodigious excitement in the liberal display of charms agitated by hard exercise.  The men were far less intrusive, they are said not to be jealous of European rivals, but madly so amongst themselves:  even on suspicion of injury, the husband may kill his wife and her lover.

At Kilwanika, the next hamlet, there was a “king;” and it would not have been decent to pass the palace unvisited.  Outside the huts stood a bamboo-girt “compound,” which we visited whilst H.M. was making his toilette, and where, contrary to Congo usage, the women entered with us.  Twenty-two boys aged nine or ten showed, by faces whitened with ashes, that they had undergone circumcision, a ceremony which lasts three months:  we shall find these Jinkimba in a far wilder state up the Congo.  The rival house is the Casa das Tinta, where nubile girls are decorated by the Nganga, or medicine-man, with a greasy crimson-purple pigment and, preparatory to entering the holy state of matrimony, receive an exhaustive lecture upon its physical phases.  Father Merolla tells us that the Congoese girls are locked up in pairs for two or three months out of the sight of man, bathing several times a day, and applying “taculla,” the moistened dust of a red wood; without this “casket of water” or “of fire,” as they call it, barrenness would be their lot.  After betrothal the bride was painted red by the “man-witch” for one month, to declare her engagement, and the mask was washed off before nuptials.  Hence the “Paint House” was a very abomination to the good Fathers.  Amongst the Timni tribe, near Sierra Leone, the Semo, or initiation for girls, begins with a great dance, called Colungee (Kolangi), and the bride is “instructed formally in such circumstances as most immediately concern women.”

After halting for half an hour, ringed by a fence of blacks, we were summoned to the presence, where we found a small boy backed by a semi-circle of elders, and adorned with an old livery coat, made for a full-grown “Jeames.”  With immense dignity, and without deigning to look at us, he extended a small black paw like a Chimpanzee’s, and received in return a promise of rum—­the sole cause of our detention.  And, as we departed through the euphorbia avenue, we were followed by the fastest trotters, the Flora Temples and the Ethan Allens, of the village.