ted red and white,
and rudely fashioned in the shape of a woman. The shed was
the largest building in the village, for it was ten feet
high, and measured fifteen feet by ten. It is the habit of
the lazy negroes of these interior villages--at least, the
men--to spend almost the whole day lying down under the
palaver-shed, feeding their morbid imaginations with tales
of witchcraft, and smoking their _condoquais_."

But all the villages of these poor children of the desert are not so
untidy as the one described above. There is a wide difference in the
sanitary laws governing these villages.

"The Ishogo villages are large. Indeed, what most strikes
the traveller in coming from the seacoast to this inland
country, is the large size, neatness, and beauty of the
villages. They generally have about one hundred and fifty or
one hundred and sixty huts, arranged in streets, which are
very broad and kept remarkably clean. Each house has a door
of wood which is painted in fanciful designs with red,
white, and black. One pattern struck me as simple and
effective; it was a number of black spots margined with
white, painted in regular rows on a red ground. But my
readers must not run away with the idea that the doors are
like those of the houses of civilized people; they are
seldom more than two feet and a half high. The door of my
house was just twenty-seven inches high. It is fortunate
that I am a short man, otherwise it would have been hard
exercise to go in and out of my lodgings. The planks of
which the doors are made are cut with great labor by native
axes out of trunks of trees, one trunk seldom yielding more
than one good plank. My hut, an average-sized dwelling, was
twenty feet long and eight feet broad. It was divided into
three rooms or compartments, the middle one, into which the
door opened, being a little larger than the other two....
Mokenga is a beautiful village, containing about one hundred
and sixty houses; they were the largest dwellings I had yet
seen on the journey. The village was surrounded by a dense
grove of plantain-trees, many of which had to be supported
by poles, on account of the weight of the enormous bunches
of plantains they bore. Little groves of lime-trees were
scattered everywhere, and the limes, like so much golden