We were forced to prepay our guide and his father too, and he went but one day, although he promised to go with us to Katema.  He was not in the least ashamed at breaking his engagements, and probably no disgrace will be attached to the deed by Muanzanza.  Among the Bakwains he would have been punished.  My men would have stripped him of the wages which he wore on his person, but thought that, as we had always acted on the mildest principles, they would let him move off with his unearned gains.

They frequently lamented the want of knowledge in these people, saying, in their own tongue, “Ah! they don’t know that we are men as well as they, and that we are only bearing with their insolence with patience because we are men.”  Then would follow a hearty curse, showing that the patience was nearly expended; but they seldom quarreled in the language of the Balonda.  The only one who ever lost his temper was the man who struck a head man of one of the villages on the mouth, and he was the most abject individual in our company.

The reason why we needed a guide at all was to secure the convenience of a path, which, though generally no better than a sheep-walk, is much easier than going straight in one direction, through tangled forests and tropical vegetation.  We knew the general direction we ought to follow, and also if any deviation occurred from our proper route; but, to avoid impassable forests and untreadable bogs, and to get to the proper fords of the rivers, we always tried to procure a guide, and he always followed the common path from one village to another when that lay in the direction we were going.

After leaving Cabango on the 21st, we crossed several little streams running into the Chihombo on our left, and in one of them I saw tree ferns (’Cyathea dregei’) for the first time in Africa.  The trunk was about four feet high and ten inches in diameter.  We saw also grass trees of two varieties, which, in damp localities, had attained a height of forty feet.  On crossing the Chihombo, which we did about twelve miles above Cabango, we found it waist-deep and rapid.  We were delighted to see the evidences of buffalo and hippopotami on its banks.  As soon as we got away from the track of the slave-traders, the more kindly spirit of the southern Balonda appeared, for an old man brought a large present of food from one of the villages, and volunteered to go as guide himself.  The people, however, of the numerous villages which we passed always made efforts to detain us, that they might have a little trade in the way of furnishing our suppers.  At one village, indeed, they would not show us the path at all unless we remained at least a day with them.  Having refused, we took a path in the direction we ought to go, but it led us into an inextricable thicket.  Returning to the village again, we tried another footpath in a similar direction, but this led us into an equally impassable and trackless forest.  We were thus forced to come back and remain.  In the following morning they put us in the proper path, which in a few hours led us through a forest that would otherwise have taken us days to penetrate.