AND THE VICTORIA NYANZA 



75 



^ i»i an.*'" 



'H- 



>\- Till-; MAIN ISLAM', SESE 



carried on by offerings of 

 food and drink that are 

 placed in little huts out- 

 side the villages, often 

 in the dense forest. 

 These grass huts are sur- 

 mounted by a long })eak 

 or steeple made of sheaves 

 of grass. Sometimes, 

 however, the phxce for 

 fetish offerings is a hol- 

 lowed stone, and over this 

 is suspended a large grass 

 extinguislier, hung from 

 the bough of a tree, and 

 shaped like a reversed 

 funnel. 



Some of the liigli 

 land in Buvuma is rocky, 

 and not unduly lusli in 



vegetation ; but there are patches of splendid forest and many of the 

 villages near the lake shore are concealed in the emerald-green depths of 

 vast banana plantations. So high do these bananas grow, so broad are 

 their leaves, and so luxuriantly do they interlace in shutting out the sky, 

 that you feel on entering such a grove as though you had been by 

 magic placed in the heart of a gigantic emerald. The sunlight coming 

 through the thick green leaves make all the white men's fiices bear a 

 ■ghastly pallor, while the exposed skin of the natives becomes a rich bronze- 

 green. Many of the trees in the Buvuma forests produce an acid yellow 

 plum, wliich when cooked with plenty of sugar makes a most agreeable 

 conserve, and is one of the few fruits I have ever met with in Africa worth 

 bothering about from a culinary point of view. This fruit is in all 

 probability derived from a species of Parinarium. It is a very distant 

 relation of the plum family. These fruits attract large numbers of a bold, 

 noisy bird, a species of turaco or plantain-eater, which is in all jjrobability 

 the more generalised ty[)e from which the splendid blue phintain-eater 

 {Corythieola) originated. The colours of this Schizorhis (S. zonum) are 

 as depicted in my illustration— a rather striking mixture of deep umber, 

 black, white, ash-colour, and greenish grey, and the beak with its lemon 

 edged with red makes a bright note of colour. But for the bird's noisy 

 habits its coloration would be very protective, as wIhmi he keeps still 

 amongst the branches he cannot be distinguished from their brown, grey, 



