The Babuckur are a tropical negro race. Their complexion is very dark. As slaves they are very useful, being of a docile and enduring temperament, handy in the house, and expert at almost any ordinary work. They are short in stature, and have a vacant, not to say a repulsive, expression. The women, when they have once passed their youth are, as a rule, the very incarnation of ugliness, for besides having extremely irregular features, they mutilate their faces in a most frightful way. All married women[56] pierce the rims of their ears and both their lips, and insert bits of grass-stalk about an inch long in the holes, some of them having as many as twenty of these grass-slips about their mouth and ears. The sides of the nostrils are treated in the same way as amongst the women of the Bongo, as I noticed in its proper place.
As Mohammed was anxious to inspect his Mittoo Seribas again before returning to his chief settlement, I did not wait for him, but, accompanied by a small retinue, I started off on the 29th of June, taking the nearest route to Sabby. For the first four miles we followed the same path by which we had come to Mbomo, and although the rain fell incessantly, the bamboo-forest was so unbroken that it afforded us an effectual shelter, and we reached the descent to the Morokoh with dry skins. After crossing the brook we turned off in a north-westerly direction, at an acute angle to our previous path.
FORDING THE LEHSSINDAH.
An immense tract of forest, utterly barren and uninhabited, was now before us. The nearest cultivated spot would be the villages of the Bongo, near Ngoly, which could not be less than forty miles away, and certainly could not be reached within three days. After crossing four little meadow-waters, and fording the Lehssindah where it flowed between its gneiss banks, we encamped for the night about a league further on, near another of these meadow-waters, which are very numerous, and which, spreading themselves out in open glades, sometimes 500 paces wide, break the monotony of the wooded scene.
The whole region was enlivened by herds of hartebeests, and choosing my position at the head of the procession, I was ever on the qui vive to pursue them. My exertions in this way made the distance that I actually travelled three times as much as it need have been; but I had no other reward for my pains than the amusement I derived from the grotesque movements of the agile creatures.
After I had comfortably settled myself for the night in my grass nest, a circumstance occurred of a kind which more than once had happened to us before. I was roused by a dull heavy sound that seemed to shake the ground like an approaching earthquake. Our camp was tolerably extensive, for, besides my own retinue, a considerable number of Mohammed’s bearers, conveying a large quantity of his ivory, had been sent in our party; but large as our numbers were, the whole camp was thrown into commotion, and shouts and gun-shots were heard from every quarter. The explanation of the uproar was that an enormous herd of buffaloes in their nightly wanderings had come scampering down upon our position, and exposed us to the manifest risk of being trampled to death.
SHARPLY STUNG.
Early on the second morning we reached the banks of the Lehssy. The deep river-bed was now quite full, the stream being forty feet wide and flowing in a westerly direction at the rate of sixty feet a minute. The bearers performed the passage by the ordinary manœuvre of bridging over the water. For my own part I thought to adopt a scheme which would give some variety to the monotony of these proceedings, and became the victim of a little episode of by no means an agreeable nature. There would be a difficulty, I felt, in wearing my boots to cross the tangled branches of which the extemporised bridges are formed; they would permit no sure hold to the feet, and to walk over bare-footed would not have been a prudent experiment, as I might become footsore and prevented from marching; I therefore abandoned all idea of clambering over, but undressed myself and proceeded to swim across the flood. When I was just within a few strokes of the opposite shore, all at once I experienced a painful shock that throbbed through every limb; I had come into contact with one of the prickly mimosa-bushes, which I have already described as frequently hedging in the various streams. The river-bed being now full to its entire capacity, the water had completely risen above the dangerous shrubs, so that they had quite escaped my notice. I knew the nature of these thorny barriers by experience, and when I mention that I never found the stoutest boots able to withstand the penetrating power of the spikes, it may be imagined to a degree what agony I now suffered. It was like stranding on a reef of thorns. The utmost refinement of cruelty could hardly devise an instrument of torture much more effectual than these mimosæ. However, swim I must. With a desperate effort I got myself free from the entanglement of the shrubs, and, bleeding from a hundred lacerations, I contrived to reach the land. I felt as if my whole body had been scarified. But there was no time to lose; so, in spite of the nervous shock, the angry wounds, and the smarting skin, I set out at once in continuation of our march.
We travelled five leagues that day and crossed six separate meadow-waters and glades of the same character as those already mentioned.
After proceeding for a considerable distance over bare red rocks, we were overtaken by a sudden storm of rain, and had to take hasty measures for protecting the baggage. But the interruption did not prevent me from doing a little interesting botanizing during the interval of delay. I found two of the prettiest plants that the land produces here, showing themselves in great abundance: a little orchid (Habenaria crocea) with saffron-coloured blossoms, and a sky-blue Monbretia, not unlike a squill. In many places the barren rocks were overspread with patches of these plants, that they looked as though a carpet had been laid out upon them, the colours blending into patterns that would not disgrace the flower-beds of our modern gardening.