Banza Nkaye, as usual uninclosed, contains some forty habitations, which may lodge two hundred head.  The tenements are built upon platforms cut out of the hill slopes; and the make proves that, even during the rains, there is little to complain of climate.  Ten of these huts belong to royalty, which lives upon the lowest plane; and each wife has her own abode, whilst the “senzallas” of the slaves cluster outside.  The foundation is slightly raised, to prevent flooding.  The superstructure strikes most travellers as having somewhat the look of a chalet, although Proyart compares it with a large basket turned upside down.  Two strong uprights, firmly planted, support on their forked ends a long strut-beam, tightly secured; the eaves are broad to throw off the rain, and the neat thatch of grass, laid with points upwards in regular courses, and kept in site by bamboo strips, is renewed before the stormy season.  The roof and walls are composed of six screens; they are made upon the ground, often occupying months, and they can be put together in a few minutes.  The material, which an old traveller says is of “leaves interwoven not contemptibly with one another,” is a grass growing everywhere on the hills, plaited and attached to strips of cane or bamboo-palm (Raphia vinifera); the gable “walls” are often a cheque-pattern, produced by twining “tie-tie,” “monkey rope,” or creepers, stained black, round the dull-yellow groundwork; and one end is pierced for a doorway, that must not front the winds and rains.  It is a small square hole, keeping the interior dark and cool; and the defence is a screen of cane-work, fastened with a rude wooden latch.  The flooring is hard, tamped clay, in the centre of which the fire is laid; the cooking, however, is confined to the broad eaves, or to the compound which, surrounded with neat walls, backs the house.  The interior is divided into the usual “but” and “ben.”  The latter communicates with the former by a passage, masked with a reed screen; it is the sleeping-place and the store-room; and there is generally a second wicket for timely escape.  The only furniture consists of mats, calabashes, and a standing bedstead of rude construction, or a bamboo cot like those built at Lagos,—­in fact, the four bare walls suggest penury.  But in the “small countries,” as the “landward towns” are called, where the raid and the foray are not feared, the householder entrusts to some faithful slave large stores of cloth and rum, of arms and gunpowder.

The abodes suggest those of our semi-barbarous ancestors, as described by Holingshed, where earth mixed with lime formed the floor; where the fire was laid to the wall; where the smoke, which, besides hardening timber, was “expected to keep the good man and his family from quake and fever, curled from the door; and where the bed was a straw pallet, with a log of wood for a pillow.  But the Congoese is better lodged than we were before the days of Queen Elizabeth; what are luxuries in the north, broad beds and deep