82 REPORT OF THE HARVARD AFRICAN EXPEDITION 
some of the houses, still with a clay base and walls four feet high, but the great 
majority of them were built entirely of wood. A number of them were round 
and had no windows. At Trué Town, no clay was used for the walls. Here 
the walls were of parallel poles, often of cane, placed upright and close 
together. In Chekomma, too, clay was not employed in the construction of the 
houses. Here none were built on the ground but on platforms which stood about 
three or four feet high, and which consisted of a framework of poles. The houses 
were not round, but square. The roofs of palm thatch projected over and beyond 
a veranda or entrance of poles, three feet above the ground. The walls were 
wattled and the floors made of split rattan. The ceilings were so low that one 
could not stand upright, in which respect they were like the houses one sees in 
certain parts of the interior in the Philippine Islands. In the Philippines, how- 
ever, bamboo is almost exclusively used in construction. 
Among these people, locally known as the Kulus, we found some of the best 
physically developed men in Liberia. They were tall, lithe, strongly-formed, and 
made excellent porters. When they carried for days at a time in the forest, they 
would call to one another by baying, as hounds often do. They are a savage 
people and sometimes would beat their drums furiously throughout the entire 
night. 
Coming still nearer to the coast, among the tribes of the Bo people, we noticed 
a death ceremony that we had not observed elsewhere in Liberia. Two days 
after our arrival, a woman died of puerperal septicemia. The women of the 
village congregated about her house and began to lament and howl loudly. They 
kept up their lamentations almost continuously for forty-eight hours, when the 
body was taken for burial to the edge of the village by the forest. It is said that 
the relatives of the deceased must eat no rice until the next harvest of rice occurs, 
and that it is customary to give presents to the members of the family of the 
deceased. 
Another custom, said to exist among these people, permits a girl who, as is 
usual, is betrothed to a man early in life, to take an official lover, if she chooses 
to do so, up to the time the marriage ceremony actually occurs with the man to 
whom she has been betrothed earlier in life. 
The people in the towns north of Sino or Greenville speak a dialect known 
either as Sikon or Putu, which, although bearing considerable resemblance to 
Kru, has certain affinities to Kpwesi and Mandingo. To the north of Sino the 
Padebu dialect is more commonly spoken. 
