82 HAIR-DRESSING. CHAP. III. 



into a firm cop on the spindle again : all the processes 

 being painfully slow. 



Iron ore is dug out of the hills, and its manufacture is 

 the staple trade of the southern highlands. Each village 

 has its smelting-house, its charcoal-burners, and black- 

 smiths. They make good axes, spears, needles, arrow- 

 heads, bracelets and anklets, which, considering the entire 

 absence of machinery, are sold at surprisingly low rates ; 

 a hoe over two pounds in weight is exchanged for calico 

 of about the value of fourpence. In villages near Lake 

 Shirwa and elsewhere, the inhabitants enter pretty largely 

 into the manufacture of crockery, or pottery, making by 

 hand all sorts of cooking, water, and grain pots, which 

 they ornament with plumbago found in the hills. Some 

 find employment in weaving neat baskets from split 

 bamboos, and others collect the fibre of the buaze, which 

 grows abundantly on the hills, and make it into fish-nets. 

 These they either use themselves, or exchange with the 

 fishermen on the river or lakes for dried fish and salt. A 

 great deal of native trade is carried on between the 

 villages, by means of barter in tobacco, salt, dried fish, 

 skins, and iron. Many of the men are intelligent-looking, 

 with well-shaped heads, agreeable faces, and high fore- 

 heads. We soon learned to forget colour, and we fre- 

 quently saw countenances resembling those of white 

 people we had known in England, which brought back 

 the looks of forgotten ones vividly before the mind. The 

 men take a good deal of pride in the arrangement of their 

 hair; the varieties of style are endless. One trains his 

 long locks till they take the admired form of the buffalo's 

 horns; others prefer to let their hair hang in a thick coil 

 down their backs, like that animal's tail ; while another 

 wears it in twisted cords, which, stiffened by fillets of the 

 inner bark of a tree wound spirally round each curl, 

 radiate from the head in all directions. Some have it 



