At the time of our visit to Mokunji the height of the grass, which is not burnt off until about May, prevented our indulging in hunting, and accordingly we brought back very little in the way of natural history specimens from this country. As a matter of fact the list of big game animals of the district is extraordinarily meagre. The antelope family is represented by bush-bucks, duikers, and another beast smaller than the bush-buck, a skin of which I was never able to see, so I cannot say to what species it belongs; the red river hog is common round Mokunji, and leopards are very numerous. Buffalo and elephant are conspicuous by their absence, though a solitary buffalo bull was killed near the Lubefu in 1907; it belonged to one of the small brown species of forest buffalo. Owing to the scarcity of other prey leopards have taken to man-eating with disastrous results to the villages between the Lubefu River and Jadi’s capital. As many as five people—all of them women—were killed in one day within a radius of ten miles from the Kasai Company’s factory, and shortly before our visit a leopard had attacked a chief on the road at sundown as he was returning home after a visit to the Company’s agent. The animal had sprung upon the chief from the high grass by the roadside, but upon becoming aware that he was attended by a considerable following, it had left its victim on the ground little the worse for his adventure. At Mokunji we were lucky enough to secure a living specimen of the mysterious “Yuka,” which had so roused our curiosity at Batempa. Tempted by the high price which Torday offered, the entire population of a hamlet turned out one night and surrounded a tree in which the animal had been heard to give vent to its weird cry; then two young warriors, evidently anxious to display their courage, had climbed the tree and captured the beast. It turned out to be a species of hyrax, which, though not unknown to science, was represented in the Natural History Museum by one skin only, sent home years ago by Emin Pasha. Its ferocity was just as much a myth as its habit of climbing with its back to the tree! In less than half-an-hour after its release from the basket in which it was brought to us it was eating out of our hands. We obtained later on a second living specimen of this hyrax, but both of them died before Hardy could take them with him to Europe. In the Lubefu River crocodiles are said to exist, but hippopotami are only to be found in it at its confluence with the Sankuru, for the current of the Lubefu is too strong for these animals; so strong indeed is the stream, and so narrow and winding its course, that a whale-boat, well-manned with experienced paddlers, takes nineteen days to ascend the river from Bena Dibele to the Government station of Lubefu, a distance of only about one hundred miles. In places the stream is so overhung by trees that it flows as through a tunnel beneath their intertwining branches. The road from Mokunji to the station of Lubefu crosses the river by one of those suspension bridges made of creepers (known to the Belgians as “monkey bridges”) which the Batetela are so skilful in building. The creepers are attached to trees on either bank, and high railings on each side of the tight-rope-like bridge prevent one from being hurled into the river when the structure sways beneath one’s weight.

During our stay at Mokunji we not only made extensive collections for the ethnographical department of the British Museum, but we were able to procure a number of human skulls for the Royal College of Surgeons. We experienced no difficulty in obtaining these, for the inhabitants did not hesitate to collect for us the skulls of those who had perished in the bush from the deadly sleeping sickness. When a person is known to have this terrible disease the Batetela expel him from the village, placing food at a certain spot each day until the fact that the food is not called for shows that the poor wretch’s sufferings are at an end. We have met several of these unfortunates when on the march, one of them a little girl in the last stage of the complaint, who presented a most pitiful spectacle, and filled us with horror at the thought of her terrible fate. But is not this primitive isolation, cruel as it may seem, the only possible way by which savages can combat the spread of sleeping sickness? The patient’s end must be horrible, that lonely death in the bush, but it may be the means of saving the lives of hundreds in the villages. The collecting of the skulls was the last piece of work that we did at Mokunji, for we were afraid that to mention such an idea as to purchase the bones of their dead might so offend the Batetela as to prevent them from imparting to us a lot of the information with regard to their manners and customs which we were so anxious to obtain. This, however, did not turn out to be the case; in fact the prices we paid for the skulls—after a large reward had been offered for the first one or two—were lower than those asked for many of the other things we purchased, so that we were enabled to send home quite a valuable series of them to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Our ethnographical work having been completed as far as possible and our collections made, we packed up the specimens (now amounting to several hundred) and despatched them to the Sankuru on their way to Europe. We then prepared to follow them, intending to proceed to Batempa and thence descend the Sankuru to Lusambo. During our stay at Mokunji, Commandant Gustin, the Commissioner of the District of Lualaba-Kasai, had passed by on his way to his residence at Lusambo after an extended tour through the eastern portion of his district, and Torday was anxious to discuss with him one or two ethnographical subjects in which he was greatly interested. We therefore determined to stay for a few days at Lusambo. When we met the Commandant we laid before him the grievance of the natives of Osodu, and we had the satisfaction of being instrumental in the release of the father of our baby hosts, for the Commissioner considered that the chief of Osodu could be safely set at liberty upon the understanding that he must acknowledge the suzerainty of Jadi, which he was now ready to do.

Once again our march was to be rendered interesting by rumours of wars, although, luckily for us, the trouble never reached the stage of actual hostilities. Jadi and Kasongo Batetela fell out over the suzerainty of two or three small villages situated upon their mutual frontier; and, as neither chief would give way nor appeal to the Government for arbitration, a breach of the peace seemed certain. Jadi beat his big war drum at Mokunji and sent messages by gong, signalling to the outlying villages to bid their warriors hold themselves in readiness to take the field. This signalling was especially interesting to us, in that it enabled us to see how perfectly a chief keeps in communication with his army by means of the signalling gong. This instrument, of which I give an illustration and of which specimens are now in the British Museum, is made from a solid block of wood, hollowed out with a primitive form of adze. It is hung round the drummer’s shoulder by a leather strap, and is thus easily portable, and can be used in directing military operations or for sending the chief’s orders while he is travelling. The words are transmitted by a series of beats, or rather sharp “taps,” of a couple of rubber-headed sticks. The sounds thus produced, though not very loud, are very penetrating, so that messages can be easily distinguished at a distance of several miles, and when passed on from one village to another (there are always plenty of people able to use the gong) can be sent all over the countryside in an incredibly short space of time. The perfection to which this system of signalling has been brought by the Batetela astonished us very much, and we put it to every test that we could think of. We gonged messages from the Kasai Company’s factory to Jadi’s village, always receiving a reply which indicated that our message had been correctly sent, and Torday and I, each accompanied by a signaller, on several occasions carried on conversations at a distance of over a quarter of a mile apart—far enough to test the efficacy of the system. Altogether the Batetela gong is one of the most remarkable instruments in Central Africa, and, where villages are fairly close together and so facilitate the transmission of messages, it could easily be made use of as a substitute to the telegraph lines, which, of course, have not yet made their appearance so far in the interior. But although Jadi (and for that matter Kasongo Batetela) had such perfect means of summoning their warriors and of directing the movements of the various contingents from outlying villages, their dispute came to an end without bloodshed. Jadi, the ex-soldier, the veteran of the Arab wars, the leader of so many warriors armed with guns—Jadi, the more powerful chief of the two, gave way. Why? Simply because his people, though in superior numbers, felt that they with their muzzle-loaders would be no match for Kasongo’s old warriors, who were renowned for their accuracy of aim with the poisoned arrow. The young Batetela loves to take the road with his gun (usually carried by his wife or child), and he uses the weapon too in hunting; but he realises the superiority of the veteran archer when it comes to the serious business of the battlefield. A good bow used by a man who has been brought up to its use since childhood is always better than an inferior muzzle-loader in the hands of a native whose ideas of shooting are usually extremely rudimentary. Accordingly, the more primitive tribes are by no means necessarily so easy to tackle as their neighbours who have attained that state of “civilisation” which includes a gun as one of its outward signs. Our journey to the Sankuru, therefore, passed off without incident, and we reached Batampa well pleased with the result of our researches among the Batetela and with the collections we had made for the British Museum. We spent only a few days in the Kasai Company’s factory by the riverside, and as soon as our old friend the Velde appeared, bringing stores and a European mail from Dima, we embarked in her and departed for Lusambo at noon one day in the end of February 1908.