58 A TRAVELLER'S TALE. Chap. II. 



yet they do not know who you are." We slept under trees 

 in the open air, and suffered no inconvenience from either 

 mosquitoes or dew : and no prowling wild beast troubled us ; 

 though one evening, while we were here, a native sitting with 

 some others on the opposite bank was killed by a leopard. 



One of the Tette slaves, who wished to be considered a 

 great traveller, gave us, as we sat by our evening fire, an 

 interesting account of a strange race of men whom he had 

 seen in the interior; they were only three feet high, and 

 had horns growing out of their heads ; they lived in a large 

 town, and had plenty of food. The Makololo pooh-poohed 

 this story, and roundly told the narrator that he was telling a 

 downright lie. " We come from the interior," cried out a 

 tall fellow, measuring some six feet four, "are we dwarfs? 

 have we horns on our heads ? " and thus they laughed the 

 fellow to scorn. But he still stoutly maintained that he had 

 seen these little people, and had actually been in their town ; 

 thus making himself the hero of the traditional story, 

 which before and since the time of Herodotus has, with 

 curious persistency, clung to the native mind. The mere 

 fact that such absurd notions are permanent, even in the 

 entire absence of literature, invests the religious ideas of 

 these people also with importance, as fragments of the wreck 

 of a primitive faith floating down the stream of time. 



We waded across the rapid Luia, which took us up to the 

 waist, and was about forty yards wide. The water was dis- 

 coloured at the time, and we were not without apprehension 

 that a crocodile might chance to fancy a white man for dinner. 

 Next day one of the men crawled over the black rocks to 

 within ten yards of a sleeping hippopotamus, and shot him 

 through the brain. The weather being warm, the body floated 

 in a few hours, and some of us had our first trial of hippo- 



