creased in length and quickness.
The nights were cold, with heavy dews and occasional showers, and we had
several cases of fever. Some of the men deserted every night, and we
fully expected that all who had children would prefer to return to Tette,
for little ones are well known to prove the strongest ties, even to
slaves. It was useless informing them, that if they wanted to return
they had only to come and tell us so; we should not be angry with them
for preferring Tette to their own country. Contact with slaves had
destroyed their sense of honour; they would not go in daylight, but
decamped in the night, only in one instance, however, taking our goods,
though, in two more, they carried off their comrades' property. By the
time we had got well into the Kebrabasa hills thirty men, nearly a third
of the party, had turned back, and it became evident that, if many more
left us, Sekeletu's goods could not be carried up. At last, when the
refuse had fallen away, no more desertions took place.

Stopping one afternoon at a Kebrabasa village, a man, who pretended to be
able to change himself into a lion, came to salute us. Smelling the
gunpowder from a gun which had been discharged, he went on one side to
get out of the wind of the piece, trembling in a most artistic manner,
but quite overacting his part. The Makololo explained to us that he was
a Pondoro, or a man who can change his form at will, and added that he
trembles when he smells gunpowder. "Do you not see how he is trembling
now?" We told them to ask him to change himself at once into a lion, and
we would give him a cloth for the performance. "Oh no," replied they;
"if we tell him so, he may change himself and come when we are asleep and
kill us." Having similar superstitions at home, they readily became as
firm believers in the Pondoro as the natives of the village. We were
told that he assumes the form of a lion and remains in the woods for
days, and is sometimes absent for a whole month. His considerate wife
had built him a hut or den, in which she places food and beer for her
transformed lord, whose metamorphosis does not impair his human appetite.
No one ever enters this hut except the Pondoro and his wife, and no
stranger is allowed even to rest his gun against the baobab-tree beside
it: the Mfumo, or petty chief, of another small village wished to fine
our men for placing their muskets against an old tumble-down hut, it
being that of the Pondoro.