but make them of bamboo, and persevere, though no one hears the music but themselves.  Others try to appear warlike by never going out of their huts except with a load of bows and arrows, or a gun ornamented with a strip of hide for every animal they have shot; and others never go any where without a canary in a cage.  Ladies may be seen carefully tending little lap-dogs, which are intended to be eaten.  Their villages are generally in forests, and composed of groups of irregularly-planted brown huts, with banana and cotton trees, and tobacco growing around.  There is also at every hut a high stage erected for drying manioc roots and meal, and elevated cages to hold domestic fowls.  Round baskets are laid on the thatch of the huts for the hens to lay in, and on the arrival of strangers, men, women, and children ply their calling as hucksters with a great deal of noisy haggling; all their transactions are conducted with civil banter and good temper.

My men, having the meat of the oxen which we slaughtered from time to time for sale, were entreated to exchange it for meal; no matter how small the pieces offered were, it gave them pleasure to deal.

The landscape around is green, with a tint of yellow, the grass long, the paths about a foot wide, and generally worn deeply in the middle.  The tall overhanging grass, when brushed against by the feet and legs, disturbed the lizards and mice, and occasionally a serpent, causing a rustling among the herbage.  There are not many birds; every animal is entrapped and eaten.  Gins are seen on both sides of the path every ten or fifteen yards, for miles together.  The time and labor required to dig up moles and mice from their burrows would, if applied to cultivation, afford food for any amount of fowls or swine, but the latter are seldom met with.

We passed on through forests abounding in climbing-plants, many of which are so extremely tough that a man is required to go in front with a hatchet; and when the burdens of the carriers are caught, they are obliged to cut the climbers with their teeth, for no amount of tugging will make them break.  The paths in all these forests are so zigzag that a person may imagine he has traveled a distance of thirty miles, which, when reckoned as the crow flies, may not be fifteen.

We reached the River Moamba (lat. 9d 38’ S., long. 20d 13’ 34” E.) on the 7th May.  This is a stream of thirty yards wide, and, like the Quilo, Loange, Chikapa, and Loajima, contains both alligators and hippopotami.  We crossed it by means of canoes.  Here, as on the slopes down to the Quilo and Chikapa, we had an opportunity of viewing the geological structure of the country—­a capping of ferruginous conglomerate, which in many parts looks as if it had been melted, for the rounded nodules resemble masses of slag, and they have a smooth scale on the surface; but in all probability it is an aqueous deposit, for it contains water-worn pebbles of all sorts, and generally small.  Below this