84 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



had but leisure to learn their haunts and -watering- 

 places, a good account might be made of them but 

 one and all are wild in the extreme. Ostrich-feathers 

 bedeck the frizzly polls of many men and women, but 

 no one has ever heard of any having been killed or 

 snared by huntsmen. These ornaments, as well as 

 the many skulls and skins seen in every house, are 

 said to be found lying about in places where the ani- 

 mals have died a natural death. 



The following day we left an hour before dawn, 

 and crossed the second broad wilderness to Ka- 

 hama. At 9 A.M. I called the usual halt to eat 

 my rural breakfast of cold fowl, sour curd, cakes, 

 and eggs, in a village on the south border of the 

 desert. As the houses were devoid of all house- 

 hold commodities, I asked the people stopping there 

 to tend the fields to explain the reason, and learned 

 that their fear of the plundering Wamandas was 

 such that they only came there during the day to 

 look after their crops, and at night they retired to 

 some distant place of safe retreat in the jungles, 

 where they stored all their goods and chattels. 

 These people, in time of war, thus putting every- 

 thing useful out of the way of the forager's prying 

 eyes, it is very seldom that blood is spilt. This 

 country being full of sweet springs, accounts for the 

 denseness of the population and numberless herds of 

 cattle. To look upon its resources, one is struck with 

 amazement at the waste of the world : if instead of 



