66 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
one sex becomes unsightly in the other. Fat, thirty, 
and perhaps once fair, her charms had seen their prime, 
and the system of circles and circlets which composed 
her personnel had assumed a tremulous and gravitating 
tendency. She was habited in the height of Fan fashion. 
Her body was modestly invested in a thin pattern of 
tattoo, and a gauzework of oil and camwood ; the rest 
of the toilette was a dwarf pigeon-tail of fan-palm, like 
that of the men, and a manner of apron, white beads, 
and tree bark, greasy and reddened : the latter was 
tucked under and over the five lines of cowries, which 
acted as cestus to the portly middle, “ big as a budget.” 
The horns of hair, not 
unlike the rays of light in 
Michael Angelo’s “Moses,” 
were covered with a cap 
of leaves, and they were 
balanced behind by a pig- 
tail lashed with brass 
wire. Her ornaments 
were sundry necklaces of 
various beads, large red 
and white, and small blue 
and pink porcelains ; a 
leaf, probably by way of 
amulet, was bound to a 
string round the upper 
arm ; and wrists and ankles were laden with heavy 
rings of brass and copper, the parure of the great in 
Fan-land. The other ballerine were, of course, less 
brilliantly attired, but all had rings on their arms, legs, 
and ankles, fingers, and toes. A common decoration 
was a bunch of seven or eight long ringlets, not unlike 
the queues de rat, still affected by the old-fashioned 
Englishwoman ; these, however, as in the men, were 
prolonged to the bosom by strings of alternate red 
and white beads. Others limited the decoration to 
two rats’ tails depending from the temples, where 
phrenologists localize our “causality.” Many had faces 
of sufficient piquancy ; the figures, though full, wanted 
TATTOOING. 
