We became friendly not only with the Nyimi and the great dignitaries of his Court, but with all classes of natives during our stay at the Mushenge, and particularly with the children; two or three of the king’s little sons, all under seven years of age, and some of their playmates became our constant companions. When we got up in the mornings we would find the children waiting outside the tents eager to be allowed to perform some service for us, such as holding a mirror while we shaved. All day long they would sit beside us in the shed in which we worked, or accompany us upon our rambles round the village, and at meal-times they dearly loved to take the place of a “boy” and hand us our food. We used to spend most of our spare time playing with these youngsters, and I remember once, just after the death of the herald alluded to above, I returned from a search after guinea-fowl to find the children playing the parts of dignitaries at a funeral ceremony, in which Torday, reclining in his deck-chair, was acting as the corpse! The children were very good as a rule, and remarkably fair in all their games and disputes. Two of them, by name Mikope and Mingi Bengela, who were bosom friends really, would fight just after we had partaken of our midday meal. These conflicts were often most amusing, the blows delivered (which, by the way, never landed upon the person of the adversary) were so terrific that their impetus frequently caused the champion who dealt them to sprawl upon the ground, and tears of rage would spring into the hero’s eyes as, time after time, they beat the air. But should another child attempt to do anything so unfair as to touch either combatant during the fray both Mikope and Mingi Bengela, forgetting their own differences, would turn upon the intruder and belabour him as hard as they could. As soon as one of these fights was over (that is to say, when the combatants were weary or when anything else more exciting attracted their attention) it was forgotten, and the two gladiators became as friendly as before their dispute. During the time that food was very scarce I undertook a trip to the north-west of the Mushenge, towards the confluence of the Kasai and Sankuru, in the hope of being able to shoot some game and send the meat back to Torday, for at this time several European travellers were expected at the capital, including a Belgian journalist, a military officer, and Colonel Chaltin, famous in the Arab wars, who had recently become director of the Kasai Company. I stayed in several small villages in a thickly-wooded country, where I tried to obtain an elephant. The natives told me that the forest on the left bank of the Sankuru is rapidly spreading southwards towards the Mushenge, and I was shown several places now clothed thickly with young woods which had been open country in the memory even of natives of about twenty-five years of age. Elephants are fairly numerous in this country, but I was never able to obtain one. They pass their time in the low-lying part of the woodlands, which is mostly submerged and in which the undergrowth is so dense as to render a very near approach necessary before even so large a beast as an elephant can be seen, and when one is continually slipping about on roots concealed from view by the water one can scarcely hope to get very near to a beast without attracting his attention. Upon the only occasion when I did really believe that I should succeed in bagging an elephant the native that accompanied me got such a bad attack of nerves that he bolted, making off in one direction while the elephant retired hurriedly in another, and leaving me to follow him as best I could through a forest swamp with darkness rapidly coming on. I had no choice but to follow the man, for the whole country was under water, often as deep as one’s waist, and I knew that I should have very little chance of getting out of the woods at all if I allowed my companion to get out of sight or earshot. After several unsuccessful attempts to get an elephant I realised that I was wasting time and sending Torday nothing to eat, so I turned my attention to some buffalo which I heard were to be found in a clearing near a tiny village called Ikwembe. Ikwembe was a miserable place, consisting of only about ten extremely dilapidated huts, and the natives, who had probably never received a white man to stay in their village before, did not seem particularly pleased to see me. They were not in the least hostile, of course, for they knew that I travelled under the protection of the king, but I received a very poor welcome. Upon my explaining that I wished to shoot a buffalo, the chief, a very old man with a deformed leg, in which the knee would seem to have been dislocated in early youth and never put into place again, with the result that the limb had not grown properly, informed me that a herd of these animals habitually fed close to the village, and that his people would show me where to search for them. Just as the sun was nearing the horizon, and I was endeavouring to secure a guinea-fowl for my supper, a native came hurrying to call me, having seen five buffalo in the clearing. When I returned, bringing with me the head of one of the beasts, I began to be regarded as a welcome guest, for the Bushongo are not keen enough hunters to often succeed in killing buffaloes themselves. At dawn I sent off my six men (all the porters I had, for I was travelling with practically no baggage) to carry the meat to the Mushenge, of course presenting the inhabitants of Ikwembe with their share, and in the evening I again found the buffaloes and bagged another. On my return to Ikwembe the old chief formally requested me never to leave his village! After a few days, however, in the course of which I added nothing but a duiker to my bag, my popularity began to wane. Unfortunately much of the meat that I sent back to Torday was bad before it reached him, for I had had to wander some distance from the capital to find any game at all. The buffaloes I shot at Ikwembe appear to be “Congo buffaloes,” the bos caffer nanus of naturalists, and I should think they were larger than the animals whose tracks I had seen in the great forest. The bulls are rather darker in colour than the mounted specimen of a “Congo buffalo” from Nigeria in the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road. Of other game there are very few species, bush-buck and duiker representing the antelope family here as in most of the districts we visited, while the ubiquitous red pig is to be found in the forests. On the whole my shooting trip, though very enjoyable and affording me an opportunity of seeing something of the country and the Bushongo other than the courtiers of the king, was not very profitable as regards the amount of meat sent back to the Mushenge.

In the course of his investigations into the history of the Bushongo, Torday elicited some information which enabled him to form a theory as to the origin of the Bashilele, a people whom I have mentioned in an earlier chapter as attacking the official in charge of Basongo, near the confluence of the Kasai and the Sankuru. From what the Nyimi told him he came to the conclusion that these people and their western neighbours, hitherto known to us as the Tukongo, must be really a branch of the Bushongo stock. Before leaving Europe Torday had conceived a great desire to visit the hitherto unexplored country between Kasai and its tributary the Loange where dwell these two tribes, and now it seemed to him that, in order to complete his study of the Bushongo, it was imperative that we should make a determined effort to get into touch with the peoples whom he believed to be their kinsmen. We learned that the word “Tukongo,” which figures on many maps, is really a misnomer, like the word “Bakuba,” and that the natives of the Loange region call themselves Bakongo, by which name in future I shall refer to them. They are not, however, to be confused with the other Bakongo who inhabit the lower Congo near the coast, with whom they are in no way connected.

The Bashilele and Bakongo bore a bad reputation. They had burnt a factory belonging to the Kasai Company on the banks of the Upper Kasai; they had repulsed with considerable losses two military expeditions directed across their country from the East; and in the North they continually snipe at the soldiers and porters whenever the white officer commanding at Basongo endeavours to penetrate inland from the river bank. This much is true: the Bashilele and Bakongo must plead guilty to this; but with these facts to go upon imaginative persons had endowed the tribes with a truly terrible reputation. They were cannibals of the most debased type, treacherous and warlike; their country consisted of dense forest, in which even a strong escort would be at the mercy of the natives. All the white men to whom we had mentioned our desire to visit the country between the Loange and the Kasai had been fully convinced that if we once succeeded in entering the unknown tract we should never be seen again; but the king of the Bushongo, whose opinion we regarded as of more value than those of Europeans, considered it quite possible that if once we could establish friendly relations with outlying villages of either the Bakongo or Bashilele tribes, we might reasonably hope to be able to cross their territory. Torday therefore decided to proceed to the Kwilu River, where he had previously carried on a great deal of research work among the natives, and to attempt to march overland from the Kwilu River to the Upper Kasai, thereby connecting the work he had done on the Kwilu with that which he had now accomplished in the region of the Sankuru. It was, therefore, with this somewhat ambitious plan in our mind that we left the Mushenge at Christmas 1908, after nearly four months of interesting work at the court of the Nyimi, and returning to the Sankuru at Bolombo, descended the river by steamer to the Kasai Company’s headquarters at Dima.