88 



THE LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. 



with a little cold milk as a relish. Then entered Muha- 

 banya, the " slavey" of the establishment, armed with 

 a leafy branch to sweep the floor, and to slay the huge 

 wasps that riddled the walls of the tenement. This 

 done he lit the fire — the excessive damp rendered this 

 precaution necessary — and sitting over it he bathed his 

 face and hands — luxurious dog ! — in the pungent smoke. 

 Ensued visits of ceremony from Said bin Salim and the 

 Jemadar, who sat, stared, and, somewhat disappointed 

 at seeing no fresh symptoms of approaching dissolu- 

 tion, told me so with their faces, and went away. From 

 7 a.m. till 9 a.m., the breakfast hour, Valentine was 

 applied to tailoring, gun-cleaning, and similar light- 

 work, over which he groaned and grumbled, whilst I 

 settled down to diaries and vocabularies, a process inter- 

 rupted by sundry pipes. Breakfast was again a mess 

 of Suji and milk, — such civilised articles as tea, coffee, 

 and sugar, had been unknown to me for months. Again 

 the servants resumed their labour, and they worked, 

 with the interval of two hours for sleep at noon, till 4 

 p.m. During this time the owner lay like a log upon 

 his cot, smoking almost uninterruptedly, dreaming of 

 things past, and visioning things present, and sometimes 

 indulging himself in a few lines of reading and writing. 



Dinner was an alternation offish and fowl, game and 

 butchers' meat being rarely procurable at Ujiji. The 

 fish were in two extremes, either insipid and soft, or so 

 fat and coarse that a few mouthfuls sufficed; most of them 

 resembled the species seen in the seas of Western India, 

 and the eels and small shrimps recalled memories of 

 Europe. The poultry, though inferior to that of Un- 

 yanyembe, was incomparably better than the lean stringy 

 Indian chicken. The vegetables were various and 

 plentiful, tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet pota- 



