50 TRAVELS IN AFRICA.

long spears, bows and arrows, and occasionally a long gun. They are good marksmen with all these, and seldom throw away a shot ; but this arises more from the difficulty they find in obtaining powder, ball, and small shot, than from any dislike to miss their mark.

We also visited the town of Yanimaroo. It is beautifully situated at a short distance from the river-side, on an elevated spot, thinly sprinkled with large shady trees of the mahogany kind, and interspersed with evergreens and other shrubs, and a great number of that kind of palm from which is extracted the palm wine.

The greater proportion of the inhabitants are pagans ; a few, however, profess the Mahomedan religion, retaining many of their pagan superstitions. The latter are much respected, and enjoy a considerable degree of influence over their unenlightened brethren. The soil about Yanimaroo is a light yellow sand, mixed with stiff clay of the same colour, except where there are groves of palm trees, and then it is invariably a dark, rich, vegetable mould, mixed with a light red or white sand.

There are, on the banks of the river, a little above Yanimaroo, a great number of the selfconsuming tree. We never saw any of them o fire, nor yet smoking, but their appearance would lead a person to suppose they had been burnt.