It was confirmed here what we had previously heard, viz. that brothers do not marry sisters, nor fathers daughters; they were indignant, and with reason, at such a question. The bride is purchased from the father for sixty to seventy oxen: this price might be called dear, in spite of the numerous herds of cattle here; yet it counteracts polygamy and the enfeeblement of race thereby produced, as much as the forbidding of marriage among blood relations. The release of a prisoner costs only thirty oxen, whence we might conclude that their wars, which they appear to carry on only by the river’s side, are not very barbarous. Besides, their spears confirm this supposition, for they are ground off to a smooth edge, and have no barbs such as those of the people of the mountains in these regions, and in the land of Sudàn.
The spears with barbs found amongst them, have been either received in exchange, having been thrown by the mountaineers in the mutual feuds, or they have been forged by themselves for the chase, to cast at the wild deer when they hunt them to death. The poisoning of arrows, with their various barbs, is certainly against this humane view of the character of the people. They warned us of poison every time we purchased arrows, yet I found a quantity among them not poisoned. It may therefore be usual to use the latter only in war, because otherwise they would poison their spears; whilst they shoot the deer with the former, without the poison perhaps exercising any effect when the flesh is eaten—as Shömburg says, is also the case in Guiana. They bury their dead in a recumbent posture, and far away from their huts or tokuls.
According to Làkono and his relations, the rainy season will set in, in two months from the present time, (therefore at the end of March, or beginning of April.) This appears, in truth, somewhat late: for the two arms of the Nile, near Khartùm, begin to ascend nearly simultaneously on the 2nd or 3rd of May, and it is impossible that even one drop of these first rains in the high land, which the thirsty soil, moreover, immediately absorbs, and which are swallowed up by a course in a long valley-land, should reach Khartùm from hence in so short a time. The regions lying lower, and subject to the tropical rains, are the cause perhaps of the first swellings to the White Stream; for, before all those numerous low grounds and shallow lakes are full, the eventual connections with the more distant inner waters, are restored and overflow. Much more time is required for this than for the effusion of the mountain waters, near the sloping rocky ground lying before us.
If we should not, however, take the nearer district of the tropical rains as an explanation of the simultaneous swelling of both arms of the Nile near Khartùm, we could not explain this phenomenon, for the mountain waters of the White Stream must, though with a far slower course, make three times as long a way as those of the Blue Nile, in just the same time. A difference is consequently seen at Khartùm at high water, which, however, soon becomes equal, from the mutual pouring into each other of the arms, or by the damming up of the tributary streams.
Fadl is my faithful confidant in purchasing the curiosities of the country; he is slow and painstaking in a negotiation, when I immediately lose my patience. He first, for a long time, squats, as he used to do in the land of Sudàn, with the people here; plays with the glass beads,—holds the larger ones by themselves against the light, as if they were jewels; and the good Ethiopians become so confident and longing, that they can hold out no longer; and then he is very slow in giving any, so that the value increases in their eyes. They are not only, as I have before said, very mistrustful in this barter, but also so undecided, like children, that beads and goods are often given away and returned. I have some hopes that my Ethnographical collection will increase considerably in this manner during the return voyage, for we have already exchanged many weapons and other things.
The spears of this country are distinguished by a greater elegance in the workmanship, and do not exceed the length of the gigantic bodies of these men. With the exception of a few, they are javelins, seven feet long, with a shaft of the thickness of a thumb. The shaft of bamboo is encircled entirely, or partly, with a narrow band of iron, or with the skins of snakes and land crocodiles, and the lower end surrounded with an iron knob and single rings, in order that the spear may have the proper equilibrium in the hand when it is hurled. About half a foot from the end it is generally furnished with a tuft of fur, which seems to stand in the place of a feathered arrow, a weapon never seen here. The iron of the head is one and a half to two feet long, the back flat, and the knob has four little bosses.
The bows are from five and a half to six and a half feet long, of bamboo, and encircled in the same manner; the strings are made from the inner bark of trees. The arrows are very neatly wrought, have barbs, and are two and a half to three feet long.
The harpoons employed against crocodiles and hippopotami, have, with the short point, which has only one barb, a length of thirteen to fourteen feet. The shank, of bamboo, is an inch and a half thick, and is not fastened to the point (neither are the shafts to the beads of lances, so that it comes off in launching the harpoon. The point itself remains by a long thin line made of bark, in the possession of the fisherman, and is always visible to him at the end by a float of ambak wood, until the animal struck has exhausted its rage; and then, sitting in his hewn-out trunk of a tree (sürtuk), he takes the line in his hand, and with a spear attacks the exhausted beast as it comes up to the surface for air, until it bleeds to death.
The ivory rings, two of which are often seen on the upper part of each arm, are two pounds and upwards in weight; the fluted clubs of ebony are two to three pounds. The knives are crooked, rounded at the top, and half a foot long, with a handle one and a half or less in length. The people procure the materials for their beautiful works in iron from Mount Korèk, in the tanks and gohrs of which iron is said to be found, like sand, in immense quantities. They brought me a little basket full of this coarse-grained black mineral, and with it a few scoriæ. According to Marian, the men smelt in earthen pots; for furnaces and such like are as little to be looked for here as in Kordofàn.
This is pure magnet-iron, which, as my Nuba thinks, they free from the larger stones, and then shake in a sieve, to free it from the fine rocky sand. Girard says that this magnet-iron shews also, in several places, specular-iron, and recalls to mind similar appearances in the great Mica slate chain of mountains of the Brazils. The specimens of stones procured from Mount Korèk, through the natives, were of a reddish coarse-grained granite, although we had expected gneiss from thence, having found it near and upon the island of Tshanker. Yet I would not be certain that these specimens were not taken from some other mountain. What rich results might ensue from an examination of these mountains!