292 HUNTERS. 



I could not hurry matters, I went into the adjacent country to 

 search for meat for the camp. 



The country is furnished largely with forest, having occa- 

 sionally open lawns covered with grass, not in tufts as in the 

 south, but so closely planted that one can not see the soil. We 

 came upon a man and his two wives and children, burning coarse 

 rushes and the stalks of tsitla, growing in a "brackish marsh, in 

 order to extract a kind of salt from the ashes. They make a 

 funnel of branches of trees, and line it with grass rope, twisted 

 round until it is, as it were, a beehive-roof inverted. The ashes 

 are put into water, in a calabash, and then it is allowed to perco- 

 late through the small hole in the bottom and through the grass. 

 When this water is evaporated in the sun, it yields sufficient 

 salt to form a relish with food. The women and children fled 

 with precipitation, but we sat down at a distance, and allowed 

 the man time to gain courage enough to speak. He, however, 

 trembled excessively at the apparition before him ; but when 

 we explained that our object was to hunt game, and not men, 

 he became calm, and called back his wives. We soon afterward 

 came to another party on the same errand with ourselves. The 

 man had a bow about six feet long, and iron-headed arrows 

 about thirty inches in length ; he had also wooden arrows neatly 

 barbed, to shoot in cases where he might not be quite certain 

 of recovering them again. We soon afterward got a zebra, 

 and gave our hunting acquaintances such a liberal share that 

 we soon became friends. All whom we saw that day then came 

 with us to the encampment to beg a little meat ; and as they 

 have so little salt, I have no doubt they felt grateful for what we 

 gave. 



Sekelenke and his people, twenty-four in number, defiled past 

 our camp carrying large bundles of dried elephants' meat. Most 

 of them came to say good-by, and Sekelenke himself sent to say 

 that he had gone to visit a wife living in the village of Manenko. 

 It was a mere African manoeuvre to gain information, and not 

 commit himself to either one line of action or another with re- 

 spect to our visit. As he was probably in the party before us, I 

 replied that it was all right, and when my people came up from 

 Masiko I would go to my wife too. Another zebra came to our 

 camp, and, as we had friends near, it was shot. It was the Equus 



