20 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
sings the pockmarked man, in reminiscence of a smoking concert he attended 
months ago at Salisbury, before he and his companions tramped northwards 
across the Zambezi in search of gold and any other profitable discoveries they 
might make in the unknown North. 
The woman, who has taken little or no notice of the other men, has 
seated herself on the floor near the sick man’s bed and is fanning away 
the flies from his death-like face. He scarcely notices this attention, con¬ 
tinuing as before to roll his head languidly across the rolled-up coat which 
serves as pillow. 
Outside the hut it is a bright world enough—a sky of pure cobalt, with 
white cumulus clouds moving across it before a pleasant breeze. Except 
where these clouds cast a momentary shadow there is a flood of sunshine, 
making the dry thatched roofs of the round haycock houses glitter; and 
as to the bare beaten ground of the village site, in this strong glare of 
sunshine you would hardly realise it is mere red clay: it has an effulgent 
blaze of flame-tinted white except where objects cast on it circumscribed 
shadows of a purple black. 
Two or three native curs, of the usual fox-coloured, pariah type, lie sleeping 
or grubbing for fleas in the sunshine. A lank, wretched-looking mangy bitch, 
with open sores on her ears and fly-infested dugs, trails herself wearily from hut 
to hut, seeking food, but only to be repulsed by kicks from unseen feet, or 
missiles hurled by unseen hands. Little chocolate-coloured children are 
playing in the dust, or baking in the sun clay images they have made 
with dust and water. Most of the houses have attached to them a woman’s 
compound at the back, fenced in with a high reed fence. If you entered 
this compound from the verandah, or peeped over the high fence, you would 
see cheerful garrulous women engaged in preparing food. A steady “ thud, 
thud! ” “ thud, thud! ” comes from one group of hearty girls with plump 
upstanding breasts who, glistening with perspiration, are alternately pounding 
corn in a wooden mortar shaped like a dice box. Each in turn, as she takes 
the pestle, spits on her hands and thumps the heavy piece of wood up and 
down on the bruised corn. Another woman is grinding meal on the surface 
of a large flat stone by means of a smaller stone which is smooth and round ; 
again, another wife with the aid of other flattened stones bruises green herbs 
mixed with oil and salt into a savoury spinach. In all the compounds and 
about the streets are hens and broods of chickens. Mongrel game-cocks are 
sheltering themselves from the heat under shaded verandahs, which they share 
with plump goats of small size and diverse colours—white, black, chestnut, grey; 
black and white, white and chestnut, grey and white. The sun-smitten village 
at high noon is silent but for the low-toned talk of the women, of the “ thud, 
thud ” of the corn-mortars, the baaing and bleating of an imprisoned kid, or the 
sudden yelp of the half-starved bitch when a missile strikes her. 
Beyond the collection of haycock huts (occupying perhaps a half square 
mile in area), is a fringe of bananas, and beyond the bananas from one point 
of view the glint of a river, and across the river a belt of black-green forest. 
In other directions, away from the water-side is red rising ground sprinkled 
with scrubby thin-foliaged trees, among which here and there grows a huge 
gouty baobab, showing at this season digitate leaves like a horse-chestnut’s, 
and large tarnished white flowers that depend by a straight string-like stalk 
from the pink and glabrous branches. 
Noon declines to afternoon. The two men who are whole still remain in 
