SAVAGE CUSTOMS OF BATOKA 836 
with four or five wives and very few people. At his hamlet 
* number of stakes are planted in the ground, and I counted 
fifty-four human skulls hung on their points. These were 
Matebele, who, unable to approach Sebituano on the island 
of Loyela, had returned sick and famishing Moyara’i 
father took advantage of their reduced condition, and, after 
putting them to death, mounted their heads in the Batoka 
fashion. The old man who perpetrated this deed now lies 
in the middle of his son's huts, with a lot of rotten ivory 
over his grave. One cannot help feeling thankful that the 
>*©ign of such wretches is over. They inhabited the whole 
of this side of the country, and were probably the barrier to 
the extension of the Portuguese commerce in this direction. 
When looking at these skulls, I remarked to Moyara that 
many of them were those of mere boys. He assented 
readily, and pointed them out as sucb. I asked why his 
father had killed boys. “ To show his fierceness,” was the 
answer. “Is it fierceness to kill boys?” “Yes: they had 
no business here.” When I told him that this would pro- 
bably insure his own death if the Matebele came again, he 
replied, “When I hear of their coming I shall hide the 
bones.” He was evidently proud of these trophies of 
bis father’s ferocity ; and I was assured by other Batoka 
that few strangers ever returned from a visit to this quar- 
ter. If a man wished to curry favor with a Batoka chief, 
he ascertained when a stranger was about to leave, and 
waylaid him at a distance from the town, and when he 
brought his head back to the chief it was mounted as a 
trophy, the different chiefs vieing with each other as to 
which should mount the greatest number of skulls in hia 
village. 
Next day we came to Namilanga, or “ The Well of Joy.” 
It is a small well dug beneath a very large fig-tree, the 
shade of which renders the water delightfully cool. The 
temperature through the day was 104° in the shade and 94°" 
after sunset, but the air was not at all oppressive. This 
Well receives its name from the fact that, in former tames. 
