the camp polluted if one fire was made of it. I had a house built for me
because the village huts are inconvenient, low in roof, and low
doorways; the men build them, and help to cultivate the soil, but the
women have to keep them well filled with firewood and supplied with
water. They carry the wood, and almost everything else in large baskets,
hung to the shoulders, like the Edinburgh fishwives. A man made a long
loud prayer to Mulungu last night after dark for rain.

The sons of Moenékuss have but little of their father's power, but they
try to behave to strangers as he did. All our people are in terror of
the Manyéma, or Manyuema, man-eating fame: a woman's child had crept
into a quiet corner of the hut to eat a banana--she could not find him,
and at once concluded that the Manyuema had kidnapped him to eat him,
and with a yell she ran through the camp and screamed at the top of her
shrill voice, "Oh, the Manyuema have stolen my child to make meat of
him! Oh, my child eaten--oh, oh!"

_26th-28th September, 1869._--A Lunda slave-girl was sent off to be sold
for a tusk, but the Manyuema don't want slaves, as we were told in
Lunda, for they are generally thieves, and otherwise bad characters. It
is now clouded over and preparing for rain, when sun comes overhead.
Small-pox comes every three or four years, and kills many of the people.
A soko alive was believed to be a good charm for rain; so one was
caught, and the captor had the ends of two fingers and toes bitten off.
The soko or gorillah always tries to bite off these parts, and has been
known to overpower a young man and leave him without the ends of fingers
and toes. I saw the nest of one: it is a poor contrivance; no more
architectural skill shown than in the nest of our Cushat dove.

_29th September, 1869._--I visited a hot fountain, an hour west of our