288 FROM ISHOGO TO ASHANGO-LAXD. (!hap. XY. 



The men also have fancy ways of trimming their 

 hair. The most fashionable style is to shave the 

 whole of the head except a circular j)atch on the 

 crow^n, and to form this into three finely-plaited 

 divisions, each terminating in a point and hanging 

 down. At the end of each of these they fix a large 

 bead or a piece of iron or brass wire, so that the 

 effect is very singular. The Ishogo people shave 

 their eyebrows and iniW out their eyelashes. 



The native razor, with which both men and women 

 shave themselves, is a kind of curved and pointed 

 knife made of iron, well worked and tempered with 

 charcoal, the cutting edge being the convex side. It 

 is four or five inches long and has a wooden handle. 

 Slabs of slaty stone are used as whetstones. 



The Ishogo villages are large. Indeed, what 

 most strikes the traveller in coming from the sea- 

 coast to this inland country, is the large size, neat- 

 ness, and beauty of the villages. They generally 

 have about 150 or 160 huts, arranged in streets, 

 which are very broad and kept remarkably clean. 

 Each house has a door of wood which is painted in 

 fanciful designs with red, white, and black. One 

 pattern struck me as simple and effective ; it was a 

 number of black spots margined with white, painted 

 in regular rows on a red ground. But my readers 

 must not run away with the idea that the doors are 

 like those of the houses of civilized people ; they are 

 seldom more than two feet and a half high. The 

 door of my house was just twenty-seven inches 

 high. It is fortunate that I am a short man, other- 

 wise it would have been hard exercise to go in 



