CHAPTER XVIII.

The extensive Bongo village, in which we were halting and where Nassar proposed to us a closer study of the manners and customs of the female inhabitants of the country, is situated close to Daggondoûd, an important seriba.

On our way we asked our guide about the individual to whose dwelling we were going. According to Nassar, he was formerly a powerful chief, but his village had been burnt, and his fields devastated by the Dinkas and Nubians. Three-fourths of his subjects had fled, and he was now living a quiet, retired life, so as not to attract the attention of his neighbours, and, to a certain extent, his masters, in the seriba. Nassar had informed him of our desire to see something of the interior economy of his household, and he had acquiesced in the hope of getting some presents from us.

These, and other details concerning the Bongo tribe generally, occupied our attention until we arrived at the habitation of the chief, who received us in the outer room of the house, a sort of unfurnished vestibule or antechamber, the walls of which were completely covered with trophies and warlike weapons. Here were hung lance-heads of exquisite native workmanship, and there was seen the dangabor, a series of accumulated rings, most artistically made, and forming an armlet as flexible as can well be conceived. In another place arrows were interspersed amongst elephants' tusks, on which varied designs were traced, for the Bongo, besides being skilled in the manipulation of iron, shows also a great aptitude for sculpture. The ceiling was ornamented with bows, the skins of beasts, and drums hollowed out of the trunks of the tamarind tree.

Our host compelled us to admire everything; he did not omit a single detail, but unfolded all his treasures with an air of complacency, as much as to say—"There! you have never seen anything like that, either amongst my neighbours, or in your own country." In his eyes we were evidently merely a set of savages, and he looked upon himself as the sole representative, in his country, of art and industry.

At length he pulled aside the skins which served as curtains, and introduced us to his drawing-room, carpeted with reed-grass. All around this apartment were symmetrically arranged small wooden stools, each made out of a single block of wood, called _hegbas_. Although the room was empty of occupants, it evidently belonged to the ladies of the establishment, for the males of the Bongo tribe despise seats, and only allow them to be made use of by women and children. Above these stools, and hanging from the walls by carved pegs of wood, were round boxes containing flour, calabashes filled with beer made from sorghum, and called _leghuy_, and large bamboo baskets full of grain.

The sight of these viands quite startled Miss Poles.

"Good Heavens!" she exclaimed in a tone of voice in which amusement and alarm were very comically blended, "is our host going to ask us to dinner?"

Our companion's alarm was, to a certain extent, natural, seeing that the Bongos, who live on the confines of a district where we were destined soon to see cannibalism in full swing, are themselves by no means delicate in their eating. No description of animal food, whatever may be its state of decomposition, comes amiss to them, vultures, even when the term carrion might more properly be applied to them, worms, maggots, and scorpions being amongst their standing dishes. Nothing sickens them, nothing is revolting to their sense either of taste or smell.

Miss Poles was soon reassured, as there was no intention on the part of the chief to invite us to partake of his hospitality. He was merely in compliance with our expressed wish, about to present to us his three lawful wives, but, in their position as the spouses of a once powerful personage, it was essential that they should appear surrounded with a certain amount of _prestige_. Our host clapped his hands, and his private orchestra, for the Bongo is music mad, made its triumphal entry.

This orchestra consisted of four young slave girls, furnished with rude instruments. One had in her hand a species of guitar; the second, an empty calabash covered with a very flexible skin, which she beat with a bamboo stick, and the other two confined their exertions to violently shaking large gourds filled with pebbles. With these instruments an accompaniment was played to a melancholy chant, and musical talent is developed to such an extent amongst these people that their concert, though wild and strange, did not strike us as being at all grotesque. After a limited enjoyment of this triumphal march, the chief gave another signal, and his wives, lifting up the curtains, ponderously entered the room in single file.

We might very well have supposed ourselves to have lighted on a mountebank's show, or the booth of an exhibitor of monstrosities. We almost thought we heard the customary oration—"Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and take your places, and pay as you go out if you are satisfied with what you have seen. Here you behold a female savage from the heart of Africa, who has just made a tour of Europe. She has been exhibited before all the crowned heads on the Continent, and they have presented her with numerous and flattering tokens of their admiration. This woman, as heavy as she is savage, weighs, before eating &c., &c."

I stop—the phenomena are before us, and we are permitted to admire them at our leisure. The three women sit on the stools ranged along the wall. When I say "sit," I am exaggerating—such of their person as can be accommodated on the seats certainly rests thereon, but much more overhangs the sides, and even if their too unwieldy forms had not prevented their sitting according to the ordinary acceptation of the term, a certain appendage, with which they had decked themselves in our honour, would have prevented them. They had endued themselves with a species of switch tail, made of bass, which they wear only on grand occasions for the purpose of indicating their rank and position in the world, and, above all, in order to produce a still greater effect on those who are privileged to behold them.

As for the remainder of their costume, with the exception of a few feathers in their hair, another highly fashionable adornment, they were like any other Bongo female. From their flesh, pierced and perforated in all directions, hung an infinity of ornaments, necklets without number graced their podgy necks, and their noses and monstrous lips were adorned with their choicest copper rings.

The lord and master of these atrocious creatures took our astonishment for admiration. He positively swelled with importance, and, too pleased and proud to remain silent, he informed us, through the medium of Nassar, that we were the only people who had ever been favoured with a sight of his wives.

But the principal object of our visit was to gain information as to how these creatures were fattened up to their present prodigious size, and on this point we requested some explanation from the chief. Instead of replying verbally to the question put to him in our name by Nassar, the Bongo magnate, anxious to instruct us by example rather than precept, clapped his hands a third time.