174 A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. — 
depend on the Ba-nint to supply one when necessary. 
This personage is required for many purposes—to per- 
form certain rites and ceremonies such as circumcision, to 
heal sicknesses, and to decide legal disputes or judge 
criminals. The fetish-man’s decisions on all knotty points 
of law, and his general perspicacity in judicial investiga- 
tions, are much thought of among the Ba-yansi. When 
the Mu-nitni is called upon to examine into some case of 
theft or crime, he subjects the implicated nhersons to a 
most rigorous questioning before arriving at a decision. 
The “ costs” exacted by this gentleman are tremendous, 
and act effectively as a prevention against undue litigious- 
ness on. the part of natives. . 
Ibaka, the paramount chief of Bolobo, is one of the few 
potentates of the Western Congo that can be said in any 
way to be a ruler or kinglet of importance. His 
sovereignty is hereditary, and his family is considered 
royal even in its collateral branches. He rules over a 
thickly inhabited strip of the river about seventy miles in 
leneth, of uncertain width, and with a population of from 
forty to fifty thousand. Beyond his own subjects, how- 
ever, his influence is widely felt throughout the Ba-yansi 
tribes, and he occupies perhaps the same position towards 
that people as Mptimo Ntaba, the successor of Makoko, 
does towards the ba-teke. 
The country in the vicinity of Bolobo is a low table- 
land covered with dense forest. We are here in the 
central basin of Africa, through which the course of the 
Upper Congo lies, and the forests owe much of their 
luxuriance to the abundant rain-fall and to the short 
duration of the dry season. | 
Owing to the dense population and the prevalence of 
cultivated districts even in the forest, many wild animals 
seem to shun this country; still there are large herds of 
elephants and buffaloes which are little interfered with by 
the natives, whose sporting proclivities are not very 
strong, and whose ivory is all received from tribes further 
up the river, and not procured from the herds of pro- 
boscideans which range these forests. In the same way, 
