The Eastern Congo 



of fine physique with good features and laughing faces. 

 Dressed simply in loosely hung goat skins, spear in hand, 

 they were the best type of savage man — " half devil and half 

 child." I got on splendidly with them from the first and 

 as we were travelling to their homes in the mountain district 

 of the higher Malagarasi, they shouldered their loads with 

 light hearts to the accompaniment of blasts on a cow horn. 

 We now said good-bye to " Petit Albert " with much regret 

 and many hand-shakes, facing the future with light hearts, 

 whatever might befall. 



As really so much depends on one's cook and personal 

 boys in Africa, and as we had selected them with some 

 care out of many applicants at Kigoma, I will give a short 

 account of them. There were three, one always miraculously 

 neat and clean under all circumstances, even though he 

 slept in a cow-shed or on a mud-heap ; how he managed 

 it no one ever knew. Occasionally one meets white men 

 who have the knack, usually fair-haired men, but I may 

 say at once I have not this knack, for I'm usually the un- 

 tidiest man in the " safari." This number one was a Muganda 

 boy from Kampala, very intelligent, plucky, short, fat, 

 rather light-skinned, always glum, with no sense of humour 

 at all, good at cooking, waiting at table or anything else. 

 Such was my " boy " Salim — a great lad ! He thought 

 himself a cut above anyone else in the " Safari " and un- 

 doubtedly he was. 



Next came Amerikani, my wife's " boy." He had a 

 great deal to recommend him excepting his face, for he was 

 most frightfully ugly, with the appearance of having had 

 his face trodden on when a child, but happily it was a merry 

 face with a laughing twinkle in his piggy eyes. He was a 



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