286 A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
furs and plumes of his fellow-vertebrates. The ermine 
of a Lord Chancellor may seem a long way removed from 
the monkey-skin caps and mantles of an old African — 
‘“‘medicine-man,’ just as the ostrich feathers worn at Her — 
Majesty’s drawing rooms in England appear to have 
nothing in common with the parrot-plumes that a Ba- 
yansi girl sticks in her hair, but all these extraneous 
decorations are prompted by the same motives. Amongst 
the natives of tropical Africa, however, clothing is irksome 
and out of place. A scrap of erass- cloth suffices for the 
claims of the most prudish modesty. Skins and feathers 
and shells, ivory, metal, and wood, are all pressed into 
the people’s service to decorate their persons, and still an 
amount of naked skin remains uncovered and unadorned. 
Consequently on the Upper Congo, where esthetic taste 
is more developed than among the less sensitive tribes of 
the Lower river and coast, there exist many contrivances 
for supplementing the insufficiency of nature with the 
finish of art. The skins of the Ba-teke, Ba-yansi, and 
Wa-buma are frequently ornamented with broad lines 
and patterns of pigment, the designs generally following 
the contours of the body. The colours used are. generally 
white, yellow, red, brown, and black, which are obtained 
respectively from lime, ochre, “ camwood ” and charcoal. 
This “camwood,”’ which I have already mentioned as 
the bark of one or more species of Baphia (illustrated on 
page 83), also supplies the Congo people with a red dye 
lke henna, with which their nails, hair, and entire persons 
are occasionally crimsoned. Besides this coloration of the 
skin the surface of the epidermis is often varied with 
incised marks. These are principally tribal in character. 
Thus the Ba-teke are always distinguished by five or six 
striated lines across the cheek-bone, while the Ba-yansi 
scar their foreheads with a horizontal or vertical band. 
The Wa-buma do not seem, as a rule, to mark the face 
with any scars, but, in common with most of the Upper — 
Congo tribes, they practise “cicatrization,’ which means 
raising lumps or wheals of skin by slitting it with a knife 
and rubbing some irritant into the incision. This cica- 
