We spent a long and pleasant day within a few yards of another village called M’lala in Chibi’s country, also perched on a rocky eminence, where many objects of interest came before our notice.
WOODEN HAIR COMB, CHIBI’S COUNTRY
Here for the first time we saw the iron furnaces in [[45]]which the natives smelt the iron ore they obtain from the neighbouring mountains. This is a time-honoured industry in Mashonaland. Dos Santos alludes to it in his description, and so do Arab writers of the ninth and tenth centuries, as practised by the savages of their day.[3] In Chibi’s country iron-smelting is a great industry. Here whole villages devote all their time and energies to it, tilling no land and keeping no cattle, but exchanging their iron-headed assegais, barbed arrow-heads, and field tools for grain and such domestic commodities as they may require. I am told also of villages which, after the same fashion, have a monopoly of pot-making. This industry is mostly carried on by the women, who deftly build up with clay, on round stands made for the purpose, large pots for domestic use, which they scrape smooth with large shells kept for this object, and then they give them a sort of black glaze with plumbago. In [[46]]exchange for one of these pots they get as much grain as it will hold.
GRANARY DECORATED WITH BREAST AND FURROW PATTERN
The native iron furnace is a curious object to look upon. It is made of clay, and is another instance of the design being taken from the human form, for it is made to represent a seated woman; the head is the chimney, decorated in some cases with eyes, nose, and mouth, resting on shoulders; the legs are stretched out and form the sides of the furnace, and to complete the picture they decorate the front with breasts and the tattoo decorations usually found on female stomachs.[4] They heat the charcoal in the furnace by means of air pumped out of goat-skin bellows through clay blow-pipes fixed into the embers. It is a quaint sight to see them at work with all their commodities—pillows, knives, and assegais, fixed on to the reed walls which shut off the forge from the outer world.
WOODEN PILLOW REPRESENTING HUMAN FORM
At M’lala too we were first introduced to the women who have their stomachs decorated with many long lines, or cicatrices. Between thirty and forty of these lines ran across their stomachs, executed with [[47]]surprising regularity, and resembling the furrows on a ploughed field. In vain we tried to photograph and count them. On one occasion I succeeded in counting sixteen furrows, when the bashful female ran away, and I think I had done about half. This is the favourite pattern in Chibi’s country and with the neighbouring dependent tribes for female decoration, and they admire it so much that they put it also on their drums, on their granaries, and on their pillows, and, [[48]]as I have said, on their forges. ‘The breast and furrow’ pattern, one might technically term it, and I fancy it has to do with an occult idea of fertility.