r basket
and calabash. A virago of a wife shut the door and tried to prevent
her, as well as to cut off the beads from her person, but she resisted
like a good one, and my men thrust the door open and let her out, but
minus her slave. The other wife--for old officious had two--joined her
sister in a furious tirade of abuse, the elder holding her sides in
regular fishwife fashion till I burst into a laugh, in which the
younger wife joined. I explained to the different headmen in front of
this village what I had done, and sent messages to Chirikaloma
explanatory of my friendly deed to his relative, so that no
misconstruction should be put on my act.

We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on
the path: a group of mon stood about a hundred yards off on one side,
and another of women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab
who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price
he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer.

_27th June, 1866._--To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as
he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves
with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food;
they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come
from; some were quite young. We crossed the Tulosi, a stream coming
from south, about twenty yards wide.

At Chenjewala's the people are usually much startled when I explain
that the numbers of slaves we see dead on the road have been killed
partly by those who sold them, for I tell them that if they sell
their fellows, they are like the man who holds the victim while the
Arab performs the murder.

Chenjewala blamed Machemba, a chief above him on the Rovuma, for
encouraging the slave-trade; I told him I had travelled so much among
them that I knew all the excuses they could make, each headman blamed
some one else.

"It would be better if you kept your people and cultivated more
largely," said I, "Oh, Machemba sends his men and robs our gardens
after we have cultivated," was the reply. One man said that the Arabs
who come and tempt them with fine clothes are the cause of their
selling: this was childish, so I told them they would very soon have
none to sell: their country was becoming jungle, and all their people
who did not die in the road would be making gardens for Arabs at Kilwa
and elsewhere.

_28th June, 1866._--When we got about an hour from Chenjewala