Bongo Tribe. 117 A man may have only three wives ; he buys them for so many plates of iron from their fathers. The people have no religion or any name for a deity except Loma, which denotes luck or ill-luck. But they have an extraordinary fear of witches, devils, and spirits.

They have rude methods of surgery ; deformed persons and cripples are seldom seen, and previous to the settlement of the Khartumers there was no syphilis, which now makes considerable ravages.

The dialect spoken throughout tbe country is generally the same. It is very simple in its grammatical structure, and has a great variety of terms for concrete subjects.

Bongo Land is traversed from south to north by five Water, important tributaries of the Bahr el Ghazal, with numerous smaller rivulets, not permanent streams, though the pools which remain during the dry season furnish a sufficient supply for the vegetation of the country.

Water for drinking never fails, although from November to end of March a fall of rain is exceptional. In case of necessity, water can always be obtained from the pools above mentioned.

The crops are far more frequently injured by a super- Crops. abundance of water than by drought, and the continuance of wide inundations has been followed by famine.

Towards the end of August, the sorghum harvest commences by the pulling of the light crop sown at the end of April. The ingathering of the heavier kind of corn does not take place till the beginning of December, after the rains.

In this district, sorghum takes eight months to come to maturity, though only five or six in Sennar and Taka. Both the early and late sorts attain a height of nearly 15 feet, Schweinfurth says:—"In all descriptions of sorghum as given by travellers there seems to be a considerable confusion with respect to the distinctive names of this ordinary cereal. It is called promiscuously ' Kaffir corn,' * negro cane,' ' bushel maize,' ' Moorish mille,' or sometimes 'durra.' Durra is an Arabic definition which can be traced in literature as far as the 10th century In Egypt this sorghum is called ' durra beladi ' (durra of the country) to distinguish it from maize, which is known as 'durra Shahmi' or Syrian durra. In Syria itself,