ORNAMENTS. 



435 



ears, making a three "old parting ; there are also 

 garnishings and outworks of stunted pigtails, 

 forming stiff and savage accroche-cceurs. Two 

 peculiar coiffures at 'once attract the stranger's 

 eye. One makes the head look as if split into 

 a pair of peaks, the side hair being raised from 

 sinciput to occiput in tall double unpadded rolls, 

 parted by a deep central hollow : this style is 

 nowhere so pronounced as near the Gaboon 

 river, where the heads of the Mpongwe girls 

 appear short-horned. The other consists of 

 frizzly twists trained lengthwise from nape to 

 brow, and the whitish etiolated scalp showing 

 itself between the lines as though the razor had 

 been used : the stripes suggest the sections of a 

 musk-melon or the meridians of a map. 



The favourite feminine necklace is a row of 

 sharks' teeth ; some use beads, others bits of 

 copal, but the amber so highly valued in the 

 Somali country is here not prized. I have alluded 

 before to the artificial deformity of ear-lobes dis- 

 tended by means of the Mpogo, a mixture of raw 

 Copal (Chakazi) and Cinnabar. The left nostril is 

 usually honoured with some simple decoration — 

 a stud or rose-shaped button of wood or bone, of 

 ivory or of precious metal, and at times its place is 

 taken by a clove or a pin of Cassava. The tattoo 



