112 A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
theory of an exclusive pine-apple diet. Here it was 
quite impossible to resist halting; we arrived at about 
eight in the morning, and for two whole hours we sat 
and ate pine-apples. A few brass rods paid for the 
entire feast, and the generous natives, moreover, brought 
us a heaped-up basketful to carry on our journey. How- 
ever burdened the men might be, this was an extra load 
they never refused. 
Everywhere along the road here, are what seem to be 
rude imitations of telegraph posts, tall straight poles, 
with lines of fine string stretched from pole to “pole ; but 
from these strings descend numbers of loops or nooses, 
with a slip-knot. These I took to be for catching birds, 
as you sometimes see in English orchards similar traps 
for catching fieldfares and other fruit-eaters; but on 
inquiry I found they were set for bats, which fly against 
them in the dusk and are thus frequently caught to be 
eaten by the natives. Whether a bat is good for food I — 
certainly doubt, the insect-eating ones would not seem to 
be so, and those that only subsist on fruit have an offensive 
smell of musk. But the people here seem to appreciate 
them. About this region the bracken fern, apparently of 
three or four varieties, become very abundant, absolutely 
covering large tracts of land. Where the region is at all 
marshy, along the banks of streams, this is rivalled by 
beautiful lycopodiums of most exquisite fern-like shape, 
and sometimes with a bluish tinge about their fronds. 
Curiously enough, the natives, who have very fair 
elementary notions about natural classification, do not 
recognise the bracken as a fern, but, on the other hand, 
include the lycopods in that order, to which, in their 
language, they give a generic name, ‘‘ Manselele” (plur. 
of Nselele). 
In the midst of the forest we came across a little fetish | 
house. It was built of a framework of laths and the roof 
was thatched. On the projecting stakes of the roof plates 
and dishes of European manufacture were “ spiked,” that — 
is, by some ingenious means a hole had been roughly 
pierced through “their centres, and they were hung on the 
