ngth
increased as I persevered. From Tanganyika west bank say =

29 deg. 30' east - 140' = 2 deg. 20,'
2 20
-------
27 deg. 10' Long.

Chief village of Moenekuss.

Observations show a little lower altitude than Tanganyika.

_22nd September, 1869._--Moenekuss died lately, and left his two sons to
fill his place. Moenembagg is the elder of the two, and the most
sensible, and the spokesman on all important occasions, but his younger
brother, Moenemgoi, is the chief, the centre of authority. They showed
symptoms of suspicion, and Mohamad performed the ceremony of mixing
blood, which is simply making a small incision on the forearm of each
person, and then mixing the bloods, and making declarations of
friendship. Moenembagg said, "Your people must not steal, we never do,"
which is true: blood in a small quantity was then conveyed from one to
the other by a fig-leaf. "No stealing of fowls or of men," said the
chief: "Catch the thief and bring him to me, one who steals a person is
a pig," said Mohamad. Stealing, however, began on our side, a slave
purloining a fowl, so they had good reason to enjoin honesty on us! They
think that we have come to kill them: we light on them as if from
another world: no letters come to tell who we are, or what we want. We
cannot conceive their state of isolation and helplessness, with nothing
to trust to but their charms and idols--both being bits of wood. I got a
large beetle hung up before an idol in the idol house of a deserted and
burned village; the guardian was there, but the village destroyed.

I presented the two brothers with two table cloths, four bunches of
beads, and one string of neck-beads; they were well satisfied.

A wood here when burned emits a horrid faecal smell, and one would think
the camp polluted if one fire was made of it. I had a house built for me
because the village huts are inconvenient, low in roof, and low
doorways; the men build them, and help to cultivate the soil, but the
women have to keep them well filled with firewood and supplied with
water. They carry the wood, and almost everything else in large baskets,
hung to the shoulders, like the Edinburgh fishwives. A man made a long
loud prayer to Mulungu last night after dark for rain.

The sons of Moenekuss have but little of their father's power, but they
try to behave to strangers as he did. All our people are in terror of
the Manyema, or Manyuema, man-eating fame: a woman's child had