here support themselves by shooting buffaloes, at a place two days distant, and selling the meat for grain and cassava:  no sooner is it known that an animal is killed, than the village women crowd in here, carrying their produce to exchange it for meat, which they prefer to beads or anything else.  Their farinaceous food creates a great craving for flesh:  were my shoes not done I would go in for buffaloes too.

A man from the upper part of Tanganyika gives the same account of the river from Rusisi that Burton and Speke received when they went to its mouth.  He says that the water of the Lake goes up some distance, but is met by Rusisi water, and driven back thereby.  The Lake water, he adds, finds an exit northwards and eastwards by several small rivers which would admit small canoes only.  They pour into Lake Chowambe—­probably that discovered by Mr. Baker.  This Chowambe is in Hundi, the country of cannibals, but the most enlightened informants leave the impression on the mind of groping in the dark:  it may be all different when we come to see it.

The fruit of the palm, which yields palm-oil, is first of all boiled, then pounded in a mortar, then put into hot or boiling water, and the oil skimmed off.  The palm-oil is said to be very abundant at Ujiji, as much as 300 gallons being often brought into the bazaar for sale in one morning; the people buy it eagerly for cooking purposes.  Mohamad says that the Island of Pemba, near Zanzibar, contains many of these palms, but the people are ignorant of the mode of separating the oil from the nut:  they call the palm Nkoma at Casembe’s, and Chikichi at Zanzibar.[60]

No better authority for what has been done or left undone by Mohamadans in this country can be found than Mohamad bin Saleh, for he is very intelligent, and takes an interest in all that happens, and his father was equally interested in this country’s affairs.  He declares that no attempt was ever made by Mohamadans to proselytize the Africans:  they teach their own children to read the Koran, but them only; it is never translated, and to servants who go to the Mosque it is all dumb show.  Some servants imbibe Mohamadan bigotry about eating, but they offer no prayers.  Circumcision, to make halel, or fit to slaughter the animals for their master, is the utmost advance any have made.  As the Arabs in East Africa never feel themselves called on to propagate the doctrines of Islam, among the heathen Africans, the statement of Captain Burton that they would make better missionaries to the Africans than Christians, because they would not insist on the abandonment of polygamy, possesses the same force as if he had said Mohamadans would catch more birds than Christians, because they would put salt on their tails.  The indispensable requisite or qualification for any kind of missionary is that he have some wish to proselytize:  this the Arabs do not possess in the slightest degree.