538 APPEARANCE OF THE PEOPLE. 



at sunset it was 86°. This is different from anything we 

 experienced in the interior, for these rains always bring 

 down the merciiry to 72 ° or even 68°. There, too, we 

 found a small black coleopterous insect, which stung 

 like the mosquito, but injected less poison ; it put us in 

 mind of that insect, which does not exist in the high 

 lands we had left. 



January 6th, 1856. — Kach village we passed, furnished 

 us with a couple of men to take us to the next. They 

 were useful in showing us the parts least covered with 

 jungle. When we came near a village, we saw men, 

 women, and children employed in weeding their gardens, 

 they being great agriculturists. Most of the men are 

 muscular, and have large ploughman hands. Their 

 colour is the same admixture, from very dark, to light 

 olive, that we saw in Londa. Though all have thick lips 

 and flat noses, only the more degraded of the population 

 possess the ugly negro physiognomy. They mark them- 

 selves by a hue of little raised cicatrices, each of which 

 is a quarter of an inch long ; they extend from the tip' 

 of the nose to the root of the hair on the forehead. It 

 is remarkable that I never met with an Albino in crossing 

 Africa, though, from accounts published by the Portu- 

 guese, I was led to expect that they were held in favour 

 as doctors by certain chiefs. I saw several in the south : 

 one at Kuruman is a full-grown woman, and a man having 

 this peculiarity of skin, was met with in the colony. 

 Their bodies are always blistered on exposure to the sun, 

 as the skin is more tender than that of the blacks. The 

 Kuruman woman lived some time at Kolobeng, and gene- 

 rally had on her bosom and shoulders the remains of 

 large blisters. She was most anxious to be made black, 

 but nitrate of silver, taken internally, did not produce its 

 usual effect. During the time I resided at Mabotsa, a 

 woman came to the station with a fine boy, an Albino. 

 The father had ordered her to throw him away, but she 

 clung to her offspring for many years. He was remark- 

 ably intelligent for Ins age. The pupil of the eye was of a 

 pink colour, and the eye itself was unsteady in vision. 

 The hair, or rather wool, was yellow, and the features 

 were those common among the Bechuanas. After I 

 left the place, the mother is said to have become tired 

 of living apart from the father, who refused to have her 

 while she retained the son. She took him out one day, 



