The band was never allowed to perform without express orders from the king, but was required to hold itself in constant readiness; its services were always brought into requisition on his entry into the town, and whenever he honoured any public dances, weddings, or other festivities with his presence. Besides the three kinds of drums, the myrimbas, and the zither-like sylimbas, I noticed that the orchestra included some stringed instruments made of the ribs of fan-palms, as well as some iron bells, one sort being double and without clappers, some rattles made of fruit shells, and various pipes formed of ivory, wood, or reeds. The stringed instruments are used at the elephant-dance, the bells at the kishi-dance, and the rattles at weddings. On the occasion of the Masupia prophetic dance, the king lends a number of hollow bottle-shaped gourd-shells filled with dry seeds, which, when they are rattled, are exceedingly noisy. Rattles, bells, and pipes, as well as guitars of a simple make, were to be found amongst the ordinary population, but all the larger and more elaborate instruments were confined to the royal band, consequently I was unable to get hold of any proper specimen of this class of native handicraft for my collection. In nearly all settlements small drums are kept in the council-hut, and are beaten on the occasion of any successful hunting-excursion, and at funerals.

The Marutse-Mabunda melodies are somewhat monotonous, but they are very numerous, and are of a character that make it evident that a little cultivation would soon effect a decided improvement in them. Of course the ordinary manipulation of the different instruments is purely mechanical; but amongst the king’s zither-players I observed two grey-headed old men, who really displayed some amount of taste. As they hummed I could hear that their voices were precisely in time with their instruments, gradually sinking to a whisper in the pianissimo part, and as gradually rising to a forte when the tune required it. Their performance was a pleasant contrast to the discordant shouts of the head drummer, who strove to compete with the noise of his own huge instrument.

There is one more instrument which I much regret to have met with in the Marutse country at all, but which must not be omitted from the enumeration. I allude to the war-drum. In the council-hall there were four of these ghastly-looking objects. The skins were painted all over with red, to represent blood, and they were filled with fragments of dry flesh and bones, these bones being principally the toes and fingers of the live children of distinguished parents, and supposed to be amulets to protect the rising town of Sesheke from fire and sword, and to guard the kingdom generally from assault and rapine.

Singing amongst the Marutse-Mabunda people is better than amongst the Bechuanas, and may be said in many respects to equal that of the Matabele Zulus, though still inferior in the great songs of war and death.

The dance to which I have said the king invited me on the 26th was called the kishi-dance, and is never performed except by the king’s order. Its main object seems to be to inflame animal passion, and it is danced by two men, one of whom is supposed to represent a woman, or occasionally by two couples. The performers step forward from a group of young people, who are all singing most vigorously, and clapping their hands in time to the great tubular drums that are being sounded. Having turned their faces towards the king, they commence a series of gestures indicating, with many contortions, the advances of one party coquettishly rejected by the other. The costumes being royal property I failed to get possession of any of them. They consist of a mask with a network attached to it, and a peculiar covering for the loins. The masks, which are a specialité in Mabunda handicraft, are modelled by boys from clay and cow-dung, and painted with chalk and red ochre. They are considerably larger than the head, completely covering the neck. Altogether they bear a sort of resemblance to a helmet with a vizor; small openings are left for the eyes and mouth, and sometimes for the nose; upon the top are knobs adorned in the middle with an ornament made from the tail of a striped gnu, and at the sides with bunches of feathers; the tout ensemble is not unlike that of a gurgoyle. Attached to the head-piece, and covering the shoulders, is a long, tight jacket of netted bast, with close-fitting sleeves. Gloves and stockings of the same material are likewise worn. The performer personating a woman wears a woollen skirt, reaching from the waist to the ankles, over which is the skin of an animal hanging down before and behind. The only distinction between the male and female mask is that the ornament on the male is more elaborate, and that a wisp of straw is twisted round the neck of the female. A steel girdle is worn round the waist, to the back of which a number of small bells is attached, keeping up a tinkling upon the slightest movement. The dance is repeated in public almost every fortnight. It attracts a large number of spectators at every performance, but children are not allowed to be present.

On the 27th I saw some people of the Alumba tribe, who had their hair dressed in a very peculiar fashion. Over the scalp it was divided into four rows of tufts, nearly two and a half inches long, which were so thickly plastered over with a mixture of grease and manganese that the mass of the hair was completely embedded, and nothing left to appear but the ends of the tufts. Some of the Marutse wore pangolin scales round their necks, or pieces of a kind of tortoiseshell, with which they are skilful in stanching blood. I was also shown a piece of wood, which is a remedy for whooping-cough, being sucked by children with good effect.

Sepopo made repeated visits to us, always accompanied by a number of servants bringing great quantities of ivory, which he bartered with Blockley for guns and ammunition. Whenever he was going to send his hunters on an excursion, he always had the men into his residence overnight, and gave them about a quart of gunpowder each, taking an account of what he had done. Blockley made great complaints because the king always required a present after every transaction. It was a custom that Westbeech had introduced when he was the sole trader who did business on the Zambesi, and could demand what terms he liked for his goods; but now that other dealers had found their way to Sesheke they were all completely in the king’s power; and the result of the competition was to make them bid such high prices for the ivory that they had good cause to grumble at the bad state of trade.

When I went to the king next day to consult him again about my journey, I found that he had just had an altercation with Blockley, and was consequently rather cross; but by interesting him in some of my travelling experiences, I managed to put him into a good temper again, and he began to show me my proper route, by drawing a map of the Upper Zambesi and its affluents with his stick on the sand. He was much pleased with the interest I took in his communications, and calling to him two Manengos from the Upper Zambesi, who were passing through the place, and who had several times traversed the country, he made them also describe the localities; and to my satisfaction I found that their delineations corresponded precisely with his.

Whatever I had that was new to Sepopo, he not only inquired of what use it was, but almost invariably wanted to have it. He made a great many inquiries about my compass. In order to explain its object I drew a plan of the eastern hemisphere; and then pointing out Africa, showed him the direction I took through the Bechuana countries.

I was invited to pay a visit to the royal kitchen, a department that was under the superintendence of a woman, who had several assistants. Everything was very clean, and the huge corn-bins were placed on wooden stands in little separate huts made of matting and reeds. A fire was kept continually burning on a low hearth in the courtyard, at which, during the time of my visit, a servant was boiling a piece of hippopotamus-flesh. The meat, which was nearly done, was afterwards served on a large wooden dish, then cut up into fragments, placed upon smaller dishes, and so sent in to the queen.

A messenger that evening arriving from Panda ma Tenka brought word that Westbeech and another trader had arrived there from Shoshong, and as I hoped to be off next morning, I sat up nearly all night to work at my drawings. It was quite early when I was summoned to the canoes which were to take me to Makumba’s landing-place, and then wait for Westbeech. The passage down the river was just as pleasant as it had been on the way up. I gave my chief attention to the different varieties of birds, finding some interesting subjects for study in the speckled black-and-white skimmers (Rhynchopinæ), with their lower mandible much elongated, in the huge marabouts, and in the fine kingfishers. The reeds were covered with snails, and the banks literally perforated by crabs. Pools lay close together all along the shore, the stream having fallen eighteen inches in the interval of the few days since I had last passed over it.

We spent the night in a creek, starting off again betimes next morning. The boatmen exerted themselves to their utmost, and our progress was not much short of five miles an hour. On reaching Impalera I found that Westbeech, with a considerable party, had arrived before me; they were now on the point of starting to pay their respects to Sepopo. Their waggons had been left at Panda ma Tenka.

Westbeech, who had married the daughter of a farmer in the Transvaal a few months before, had his young wife with him, and was attended by his clerk Bauren; Francis, the merchant who was travelling with him, had likewise, according to his custom, brought his wife, who had already done much to secure the respect both of the white residents and the natives. They were accompanied by a distant relative named Oppenshaw, who acted as Francis’s clerk. Besides Bauren, Westbeech had also brought a man of the name of Walsh, who had formerly been a soldier, and subsequently a gaoler in Cape Town; he was a proficient in the art of preserving birds’-skins, and had come out to carry on business in that way in the Zambesi district, under the arrangement that he was to share his profits with Westbeech.

The two merchants were anxious to get their visit to Sepopo over as quickly as possible that they might get back to Panda ma Tenka, and start with their wives on a visit to the Victoria Falls. They had brought with them all my correspondence, and I had welcome letters, not only from home, but from various friends in the diamond-diggings. I received about sixty newspapers, the broad white margins of which were subsequently of great service to me, in the dearth of writing-paper; amongst them was a copy of the Diamond News, containing my first article on the subject of my present journey.

My own departure was somewhat delayed by Makumba’s absence from the town; without his assistance I could not procure the bearers which, after crossing the river, I should require to convey the articles that I had collected in Sesheke, and the ivory which I had received from Blockley as payment for my bullocks.

The passage across the river gave me no small amount of anxiety, as independently of my uncertainty about getting bearers, I was much concerned at finding a leak in the ferry-boat as large as my fist, which threatened to do material injury to a good deal of my property. Fortunately, however, on reaching the Leshumo valley I again met Captains M’Leod and Fairly, the English officers, who most considerately, during the time of their visit to Sepopo, allowed me the use of their waggon to take me to Panda ma Tenka. I waited a little while until the team could be fetched, and started off on the night of the 3rd of September. As I went along I noticed that the burning of the grass in the district had caused a diminution in the number of tsetse fly, although the herbage was already beginning to sprout afresh.

When on the following day we reached the Gashuma Flat, we found plenty of game still lurking in places where the grass had not been burned. With the waggon were two horses that the English officers had left in charge of a servant, who seemed to me unpardonably careless. Notwithstanding my warnings, he would persist in riding on considerably ahead. Approaching the baobab I told Pit and the driver to keep a sharp look-out; I had a kind of presentiment that the horses might invite an attack from the lion that was notoriously haunting the spot. We had gone but a very short distance farther, when the driver called out that he could see Captain M’Leod’s servant up in a tree and only one horse beside him; another moment and his keen eye detected a lion retreating to the bushes on our right; I was sitting on the box, and almost immediately afterwards caught sight of the other horse lying disembowelled on the ground, the few small wounds in the neck revealing too clearly how the poor brute had met its end.

The servant’s tale was simple enough. About 300 yards from the tree he had been attacked by the lion and thrown, whereupon the lion, taking no notice of him, began the pursuit of his horse; the horse-cloth had entangled itself in the horse’s legs, and the creature was quickly overtaken and killed. The servant had betaken himself to the first mapani-tree, where we found him. The other horse was grazing quietly close at hand.

We all went some way in pursuit of the lion, but without success.