more young bulls, or buffaloes, that had been brought up to labour and to
carry burthens. They knew them, it seems, by the burthens they had carried
having galled their backs, for they have no saddles to cover them with in
that country.

Those creatures not only eased our negroes, but gave us an opportunity to
carry more provisions; and our negroes loaded them very hard at this place
with flesh and roots, such as we wanted very much afterwards.

In this town we found a very little young leopard, about two spans high; it
was exceeding tame, and purred like a cat when we stroked it with our
hands, being, as I suppose, bred up among the negroes like a house-dog. It
was our black prince, it seems, who, making his tour among the abandoned
houses or huts, found this creature there, and making much of him, and
giving a bit or two of flesh to him, the creature followed him like a dog;
of which more hereafter.

Among the negroes that were killed in this battle there was one who had a
little thin bit or plate of gold, about as big as a sixpence, which hung by
a little bit of a twisted gut upon his forehead, by which we supposed he
was a man of some eminence among them; but that was not all, for this bit
of gold put us upon searching very narrowly if there was not more of it to
be had thereabouts, but we found none at all.

From this part of the country we went on for about fifteen days, and then
found ourselves obliged to march up a high ridge of mountains, frightful to
behold, and the first of the kind that we met with; and having no guide but
our little pocket-compass, we had no advantage of information as to which
was the best or the worst way, but was obliged to choose by what we saw,
and shift as well as we could. We met with several nations of wild and