270 HUNTERS. Chap. XV. 



Manenko ; and as 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 cannot 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 per- 

 colate through the small hole in the bottom and tlrrough 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 corn-age 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 cabn, and called back his wives. We soon 

 afterwards came to another party on the same errand with our- 

 selves. 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 after- 

 wards 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 lus people, twenty-four in number, defiled past 

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

 of them came to say good-bye, 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 



