Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/89

Rh women and female slaves, with a crowd of negro lads who followed the soldiers to carry their equipments. It is no easy matter to marshal more than eight hundred people in single file, and thus it was late on the first day when they reached the arid steppes of a wilderness which they were to cross. With little incident they proceeded south for some days bound for the territory of one Nganye, a Niam Niam chief, who, though the tribe was generally hostile, was a friend of the Nubian. At his settlement they arrived after crossing the Ibba, or Upper Tondy, then about one hundred feet broad, and Schweinfurth's eyes were gladdened with the first sight of the cannibal Niam Niam; "with their black poodle crops of black hair and the eccentric tufts and pigtails on their heads, they afforded a spectacle," he says, "which to me was infinitely novel and amusing. Amongst the hundreds of Bongos and Mittoos with whom the Dinkas were associated as drovers, these creatures stood out like beings of another world." Botanically, the chief feature of that region was the "popukky" grass, a species of panicum, the tallest and strongest our traveller had ever seen — fifteen feet high and with a haulm as thick as a man's finger, it affords the Niam Niam an excellent material for their huts, and is the haunt of those herds of elephants, who when the grass is set on fire perish by thousands — their brown and blackened tusks attesting the cruel war of extermination which is waged against this noble beast, and which threatens to extinguish the race as completely as that of the Dodo or the Great Awk.

After an interview with Nganye, who, with all his people, was most curious to see the white man, the caravan proceeded across his territory to an outlying seriba of the Nubians, called Nabambasso, in lat. 4° 50s. N., about eighty-seven miles due south of Sabby. To reach it they crossed a river called the Sway, which, according to Schweinfurth, is the upper course of the Djoor. At this seriba he remained from the 10th to the 26th of February, 1870. After again enriching his collections, the caravan started, and this time on hostile ground, for was not Wando, a great Niam Niam chief, at feud with Aboo Sammat? Schweinfurth had now been long enough among the Niam Niam to form some opinion of their character and customs. Though confirmed cannibals, and that from pure choice and no lack of other food, he is bound to admit that, with this drawback, they are rather a pleasant race than otherwise. The men brave and honest, and devoted to their domestic duties; behaviour which is repaid by their women by a modesty and constancy which places the tribe far above the usual standard of the Monbuttoo and other neighbouring tribes. To judge from the representations of the race which we find in these volumes, we should say that the Niam Niam are far handsomer in features and much more gentle in expression than any of the races which we find there delineated. Their aprons and girdles of skins, with the tails hanging down behind, have probably led to the fable of an African tail-bearing race. Of all the Central-African tribes, except perhaps the Monbuttoo, the Niam Niam have the most fantastic fashions of dressing their hair, so much so that we recommend some of the head-dresses and hair-dressing in these volumes to such of our coiffeurs who have the ambition of introducing a new style for our fine ladies.

But however interesting these Niam Niam may be, we must hasten on with Schweinfurth till we land him close to the settlement of the ferocious Wando, once Aboo Sammat's friend and father-in-law, but now his bitterest enemy, who had sworn, according to the testimony of one of his brothers, that if Mbahly or "the Little One," which was the Nubian's nickname in Central Africa, fell into his hands this time he should not escape, but be annihilated with all his crew, even down to the white man whom he was bringing with him. As this was not a pleasant position of affairs, our readers will be relieved to learn that not only was Wando's wrath assuaged for the time by the address and courage of the Nubian, but that this ferocious potentate actually condescended to pay the traveller a visit in his tent. There, with a composure and self-possession which no European prince could have surpassed, the corpulent savage threw himself into the traveller's only cane chair, making it creak with his bulk. In it, with the merest apology of a piece of skin to cover him, he sat in all but absolute nakedness, "revealing the exuberance of fat which clothed his every limb." And here let us not omit to record one great point in Wando's favour. Among a race of cannibals, he was the avowed enemy of the practice. What induced him to abandon human food is not known; perhaps he 