Page:A pilgrimage to my motherland.djvu/58

Rh dyeing, A small aperture is made in the bottom of a large earthen vessel, which is covered with straw and then filled with ashes. This is placed over a similar vessel, so as slightly to enter it. Water is then suffered to percolate slowly through the first vessel into the second, which as it does so extracts all the soluble matter from the ashes.

Although the native blacksmiths frequently execute very fine productions of their art, yet their apparatus is very rude. They work sitting on the ground. Their bellows is hewn out of a block of wood about three feet long, and six or seven inches deep, in the form of two cups connected by a tube, to the middle of which another tube of clay is attached, through which the current of air is propelled. The two cavities are each covered with a sack of untanned hide, and a stick of wood about three feet long is fastened to each sack. A little boy having hold of the ends of these sticks, lifts and depresses them alternately, and thus secures the action. Although different in appearance, these bellows operate on the same principle as those of civilized construction. For fuel they use charcoal made from the hard shell surrounding the kernel of the palm-nut.

I passed through two iron-smelting villages on the road between Oyo and Isehin in Yoruba, but they were