Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Discovery of the Source of the Nile by John Hanning Speke
page 113 of 672 (16%)
from Zanzibar. Moreover, these beads were said to have been
plundered from white men by the Wakidi,--a stark-naked people who
live up in trees--have small stools fixed on behind, always ready
for sitting--wear their hair hanging down as far as the rump, all
covered with cowrie-shells--suspend beads from wire attached to
their ears and their lower lips--and wear strong iron collars and
bracelets.

This people, I was told, are so fierce in war that no other tribe
can stand against them, though they only fight with short spears.
When this discourse was ended, ever perplexed about the
Tanganyika being a still lake, I enquired of Mohinna and other
old friends what they thought about the Marungu river: did it run
into or out of the lake? and they all still adhered to its
running into the lake-- which, after all, in my mind, is the most
conclusive argument that it does run out of the lake, making it
one of a chain of lakes leading to the N'yanza, and through it by
the Zambezi into the sea; for all the Arabs on the former journey
said the Rusizi river ran out of the Tanganyika, as also the
Kitangule ran out of the N'yanza, and the Nile ran into it, even
though Snay said he thought the Jub river drained the N'yanza.
All these statements were, when literally translated into
English, the reverse of what the speakers, using a peculiar Arab
idiom, meant to say; for all the statements made as to the flow
of rivers by the negroes--who apparently give the same meaning to
"out" and "in" as we do--contradicted the Arabs in their
descriptions of the direction of the flow of these rivers.

Mohinna now gave us a very graphic description of his fight with
Short-legs, the late chief of Khoko. About a year ago, as he was
DigitalOcean Referral Badge