110 MAN LION. Chap. IV. 



slaves had destroyed their sense of honour ; they would 

 not go in daylight, but decamped in the night, only in 

 one instance, however, taking our goods, though, in two 

 more, they carried off their comrades' property. By the 

 time we had got well into the Kebrabasa hills thirty 

 men, nearly a third of the party, had turned back, and it 

 became evident that, if many more left us, Sekeletu's 

 goods could not be carried up. At last, when the refuse 

 had fallen away, no more desertions took place. 



Stopping one afternoon at a Kebrabasa village, a man, 

 who pretended to be able to change himself into a lion, 

 came to salute us. Smelling the gunpowder from a gun 

 which had been discharged, he went on one side to get 

 out of the wind of the piece, trembling in a most artistic 

 manner, but quite overacting his part. The Makololo 

 explained to us that he was a Pondoro, or a man who can 

 change his form at will, and added that he trembles when 

 he smells gunpowder. " Do you not see how he is trem- 

 bling now ? " We told them to ask him to change himself 

 at once into a lion, and we would give him a cloth for the 

 performance. " Oh no," replied they ; " if we tell him so, 

 he may change himself and come when we are asleep and 

 kill us." Having similar superstitions at home, they 

 readily became as firm believers in the Pondoro as the 

 natives of the village. We were told that he assumes the 

 form of a lion and remains in the woods for days, and is 

 sometimes absent for a whole month. His considerate wife 

 had built him a hut or den, in which she places food and 

 beer for her transformed lord, whose metamorphosis does 

 not impair his human appetite. No one ever enters this 

 hut except the Pondoro and his wife, and no stranger is 

 allowed even to rest his gun against the baobab-tree beside 

 it : the Mfumo, or petty chief, of another small village 

 wished to fine our men for placing their muskets against 

 an old tumble-down hut, it being that of the Pondoro. 



