SLAVES SET FREE. 315 especially among the birds striking varieties, such as Schizorhis, Irrisor erythrorhynchus (a mad chatterer), and parrots, are very numerous. Among rarer visitors may be mentioned Corythaix leucolopha, which, in small companies of two or three, coo and laugh in the tips of the highest trees. Their red wing feathers are used in the district of Bufi for the discovery of thieves.

My Monbuttu escort increases from hour to hour, especially since the arrival of Gambari, the chief of the district of Kubbi, which is inhabited by Monbuttu and Zande; he had been kept a prisoner during two years in the province of the Bahrel-Ghazal. To-morrow one hundred and five men, women, and children are to be sent to their homes, and numbers are still coming in requesting to be sent home. The Monbuttu, quite contrary to the usual practice among Negroes, are very clannish, and appear to possess a real love for their native country. When I playfully suggested to the girls that they should marry here, they resented the idea quite angrily. The Nyam-Nyam, too, love their relations. JI have seen a boy, ten years of age, who came all the way from Dongu to see his brother in prison. The most comical figure in the motley crowd which here surrounded me was Asika, an Akka, about thirtyfive years of age, who had been measured by Felkin in Rumbek, and had now established himself here. He is a noisy fellow, and rather tall (five feet five inches) in comparison with eight other individuals belonging to his tribe whom I measured.

Gambari and this very wide-awake pigmy told me that the Akké& are divided into numerous small tribes, and have no settled abodes. Hunting is their only occupation, and they lead a nomadic life among the Monbuttu and Amadi. ‘Tribes, however, which nomadise in one of these countries do not intermarry with tribes nomadising in another, and the Akka of the Mabode country, for instance, never mix with those in the country of the Meje. One tribe in the Meje country has a pale yellow complexion. If a company of these wandering people arrive near the residence of a chief, they build small huts for the married people, the unmarried having to be content with ‘simple sheds. They generally establish themselves along the