256 TRUE NEGROES. Chap XiX. 



accommodated witn a house to sleep in, which was very 

 welcome, as we wers all both wet and cold. We found the 

 temperature so much lowered by the greater altitude, and the 

 approach of winter, that many of my men suffered severely 

 from colds. At this, as at several other Portuguese stations, 

 travellers' houses, on the same principle as the khans or cara- 

 vanserais of the East, have been erected, and are furnished 

 with benches for the wayfarer to make his bed on, chairs and 

 a table, and a large jar of water. These benches, though far 

 from luxurious couches, were preferable to the wet ground 

 under the rotten fragments of my gipsy-tent, and I continued 

 to use them until I found that they were tenanted by certain 

 inconvenient bedfellows. 



21th. — Five hours' ride through a pleasant country of forest 

 and meadow brought us to a village of the Basongo, a tribe 

 living in subjection to the Portuguese. We crossed several 

 little streams, flowing in a westerly direction, which unite to 

 form the Quize, a feeder of the Coanza. The Basongo were 

 very civil, as indeed is the case with all the tribes subject to 

 the Portuguese. The subjection is indeed little more than 

 nominal in this part of the county ; but the governors of 

 Angola wisely accept the limited allegiance rendered by these 

 distant tribes as better than none. 



The inhabitants of this region possess the characteristics 

 of the true negroes, such as dark colour, thick lips, heads 

 elongated backwards and upwards and covered with wool, 

 flat noses, with other negro peculiarities ; but it must not 

 be supposed that all these features are necessarily, or even 

 frequently, combined in one individual. All, for instance, 

 have a certain thickness and prominence of lip, but in many 

 instances these characteristics are hardly more marked than in 

 Europeans. All are dark, but the degree of darkness varies 

 from deep black to light yellow. As we go westward the 

 light colour predominates over the dark, until we approach 

 the coast, where, under the influence of damp from the sea 

 air, the shade deepens into the general blackness of the coast 

 population. The shape of the head, again, with its woolly 

 crop, though general, is not universal. 



We passed through a fertile and well-peopled country to 

 Sanza on the river Quize, and here we had the pleasuro oi 



