THE CONGOESE. 
171 
When two of their hordes meet, the reception is friendly on both sides, 
and they treat each other as brethren, though they have never seea 
each other before. When they emigrate from these kraals, they leave 
their huts standing, that other tribes who travel that way may 
make use of them. Active and nimble, they climb the highest moun- 
tains and most dangerous rocks. They conducted M. Vaillant, with 
his servants and cattle, over precipices, which he and his Hottentots 
without their aid would have reckoned absolutely impassable. Their 
only arms are bows and arrows, which they use with great expert- 
ness. Nocturnal fires are a kind of telegraph, which they have 
brought to great perfection, and, by varying the number and form 
of which, they announce to their distant friends a victory or defeat, 
an arrival or departure, a successful expedition, or the want of 
assistance. ^ 
Among their physical peculiarities, M. Vaillant describes “an 
enormous natural rump of the women, which distinguishes them from 
all other people.’^ But this rump we suspect not to be natural, any 
more than the little feet of the Chinese women, but the effect of art ; 
for he adds, that when the women have children too young to follow 
them, they place them on this rump, and that he has seen one of 
these women run with a child of three years old, that stood erect on 
its feet at her back, like a foot-boy behind a carriage.” The utility, 
therefore of such an artificial pad, to women who travel without 
clothing, is self-evident, and accounts for its formation and con- 
tinuance. 
Character, CoMPLExio^f, Manners, and Religion of the 
CONGOESE. 
Congo is a country of Africa. There is scarcely a nation on 
earth that have a higher opinion of themselves or their country, 
than the Congoese, or that is more hardened against all conviction 
to the contrary, from reason, experience, or comparison with other 
countries in Europe and Asia. Indeed, it is impossible they should 
think otherwise, when it is one of the fundamentals of their belief, 
that the rest of the world was the work of angels, but that the king- 
dom of Congo, in its full and ancient extent, was the handiwork of 
the Supreme Architect ; and of course has vast prerogatives and 
advantages over all others. When told of the magnificence of the 
European and Asiatic courts, their immense revenues, the grandeur 
of their palaces and edifices, the riches and happiness of their 
subjects, the great progress they have made in the arts and sciences, 
to which their country is wholly a stranger, — ^they coolly answer, that 
all this coihes vastly short of the dignity and splendour of the kings 
and kingdom of Congo ; and that there can but be one Congo in the 
world, to the happiness of whose monarch and people all the rest were 
created to contribute, and to whose treasury the sea and rivers pay 
their constant tribute of shells, which are their current coin ; whilst 
other princes must condescend to enrich themselves by digging 
through rocks and mountains, to come at the excrements of the 
earthj — so they style gold and silver, which are in such great request 
