Handsome as are the Shooa women, their beauty is held in great contempt by the negro tribes among which they live, and who naturally think that thick lips, flat noses, and black skins constitute the only real beauty in man or woman.
THE TIBBOOS.
Allied, in all probability, to the Shooas are the Tibboos.
They are a small and active race, and are admirable horsemen, always leaping on their horses at a single bound, aiding themselves with the shaft of a spear, which is used as a leaping-pole. Their saddles are of wood, lashed together with thongs of cow-hide, and left open along the middle, so as to avoid galling the horse’s back. They are well stuffed with camel’s hair, and are comfortable enough when the rider is used to them. Both the girth and the stirrup leathers are of plaited leather, and the stirrups themselves are so small that they only admit of four toes. In fact, the Tibboo saddle is almost exactly like that of the Patagonian.
The men are very ugly, but the women are tolerably good-looking, and those who live in the country are better made and more active than those who live in the towns. The color is copper, but the noses are flat, and the mouth is very large, though without the thick lips of the negro.
Their dress is a tolerably large Soudan wrapper, folded round the body and tied on the left shoulder so as to leave the right side bare. It is, however, disposed in such a manner as to be a perfectly delicate as well as a graceful costume. A smaller wrapper is thrown over the head, and is drawn across the face or flung back at pleasure. The hair is dressed in triangular flaps, which fall on either side of the face; and they wear necklaces of amber, which they prize very highly, and bits of red coral in their noses. They invariably carry something by way of a sunscreen, such as a bunch of ostrich-feathers, a tuft of long grass, or even a leafy bough.
Ugly as the men are, they are exceedingly vain of their personal appearance; and on one occasion, when Major Denham had lent a Tibboo chief a small looking-glass, the man spent several hours in contemplating his own features, bursting every now and then into loud ejaculations of joy at his own beauty, and sometimes leaping in the air in the extremity of his delight.
They contrive to make their naturally ugly faces still less attractive by their inveterate habit of taking snuff, which they take both by the mouth and the nostrils, the latter becoming enormously extended by their habit of thrusting the snuff into their heads with their fingers. Their mouths are also distended by their custom of placing quantities of snuff between the lips and gums.