i88 THE MFUMBIRO VOLCANOES 



experience had taught us that that was the last thing 

 in the world to be desired. 



According to rumour, both native and European, 

 and I see no strong reason why it should not be 

 correct, these forests on the Mfumbiro volcanoes 

 are inhabited by a race of Pygmies. A Belgian 

 officer, who had spent several months surveying in 

 the volcanoes to the east, told me that his people 

 had once caught one of these Pygmies, but that 

 he had escaped very soon after his capture. The 

 natives told us that in the forests there lived ' very 

 small, very bad people,' and, so far as we could 

 learn, they have an ill reputation for descending 

 from their forests and plundering the more indus- 

 trious people who live below. Though they are 

 separated by a wide distance of more or less open 

 country from that part of the great forest where the 

 Congo Pygmies live, it is possible that they are of 

 the same race ; but even if they do not turn out to 

 be of a somewhat different race, the fact of their 

 living high up in these mountains is of great in- 

 terest, and it would certainly repay somebody's 

 trouble to make their acquaintance. 



The watershed between the Nile and Kivu basins 

 is at about 7,000 feet, and from it great streams of 

 lava pour away to north and south. It looks as if 

 there had once been a prodigious eruption from the 

 east side of Tsha-nina-gongo, and the lava, having 

 flowed across and filled up the valley between that 

 mountain and Tsha-nion-gombe, had been deflected 



