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tribe, and announced that he was afraid to sleep alone because of the leopards. I assumed that he meant real leopards, and wondered how much protection our mosquito nets were going to be to us, but it seems that he meant the Leopard Society, which is an outlawed band of professional murderers. They make raids from time to time, kill their victim, tear out his heart, cut off one toe and part of a finger, and leave the remains by the roadside. [[strikethrough]]Other tabus[[\strikethrough]] Interesting tabus in Balala are that it is forbidden here to blow a whistle in the village or to eat a chimpanzee.

March 22 - 

We were up before five o'clock, and were swinging across a high bridge in the misty light of early morning. Although it begins to be daylight about five thirty, and is light at six, the sun never gets above the tall trees of the surrounding jungle before 8.

My hammock carriers are the speed demons of the outfit, and go yodelling through the jungle with such a racket that there is no chance of ever seeing any forest life. Occasionally a monkey can be seen disturbing the branches of a distant tree, and birds of course are plentiful, but no antelope or buffalo comes within a mile of our noisy caravan. If another hammock gets in front of mine on the road my boys are miserable until they pass it, so that I always get into a town first, and have to sit under a tree or in the palaver kitchen until the rest of the party catches up with me. We stopped in one little village about lunch time, after being carried across a wide river, and ate lunch under a big mango tree.

Here we saw a woman spinning for the first time, with a wooden spindle which she spins like a top beside her with one hand, while the other hand patiently pulls out into strands the fuzzy balls of cotton. All the men and women have tribal cicatrices, the women having an elaborate criss-cross pattern all over the abdomen and across the small of the back. The women wear a high and peculiar head-dress, that consists of black string braided into their own hair and built out a foot long; strings of black rope or hair hang down on each side of the face; cowrie shells [[strikethrough]] and [[/strikethrough]] decorate the part of the head dress that is allowed to show, but most of it is covered with a bit of cotton print. The head dress is given to them when they finish their two years in the bush school and are iniated into their secret society; they wear it for two years after their return to the village - which seems like a long time to go without combing or washing your hair. The piece of cloth tied over it is of course intended to keep it clean.

We bought coconuts, bananas and pineapples along the road, and landed in Digain, our stop for the night, about two o'clock. I was ahead as usual, and had to shake hands with the Chief, who tried most unsuccessfully to snap fingers with me according to local custom. As soon as J and Si arrived I made them teach me how to do it!

In other villages we had seen women with white clay painted on their faces, but here the women had all the exposed part of their body, which is considerable, painted dead white with this river clay. As our caravan came into the village and I was looking with amazement at this reversal of an American minstrel show, to my great