262 THE LAKE REGION'S OP CENTRAL AFRICA. 



matrons, especially the aged matrons, realised Madame 

 Pernelle's description of an unpleasant female — 



u Un peu trop forte en gueule et fort impertinente ; " 



and of their sex the old men were ever the most perti- 

 nacious and intrusive, the most surly and quarrelsome. 

 Yainly the escort attempted to arrest the course of this 

 moving multitude of semi-nude barbarity. I afterwards 

 learned that the two half-caste Arabs who had passed 

 us at Muhama, Khalfan and Id, the sons of Muallim 

 Salim of Zanzibar, had, whilst preceding us, spread 

 through Ugogo malevolent reports concerning the Wa- 

 zungu. They had one eye each and four arms ; they 

 were full of " knowledge," which in these lands means 

 magic; they caused rain to fall in advance and left 

 droughts in their rear ; they cooked water melons and 

 threw away the seeds, thereby generating small-pox ; 

 they heated and hardened milk, thus breeding a murrain 

 amongst cattle ; and their wire, cloth, and beads caused 

 a variety of misfortunes ; they were kings of the sea, and 

 therefore white-skinned and straight-haired — a standing 

 mystery to these curly-pated people — as are all men 

 who live in salt water ; and next year they would return 

 and seize the country. Suspicion of our intentions 

 touching " territorial aggrandisement " was a fixed idea : 

 everywhere the value attached by barbarians to their 

 homes is in inverse ratio to the real worth of the article. 

 Hence mountaineers are proverbially patriotic. Thus 

 the lean Bedouins of Arabia and the lank Somal, though 

 they own that they are starving, never sight a stranger 

 without suspecting that he is spying out the wealth of 

 the land. "What will happen to us?" asked the 

 Wagogo ; " we never yet saw this manner of man ! " 

 But the tribe cannot now forfeit intercourse with the 

 coast : they annoyed us to the utmost, they made the 



