Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/383

 a dance, which is accompanied by singing and castanet-playing. The performance is generally kept up until a very late hour. If the girl is a daughter or near relation of the king ora koshi, she is carried off by her people to some out-of-the-way place in a neighbouring wood or reed-thicket, where she has to reside in seclusion for eight days, attended only by her own maid, except that in the evening she is visited by her friends, who perfume her head, and instruct her in her conjugal duties, so that at the end of her probation she may be ready to go to her husband. I have already described the marriage-dance, in which only men take part. As a rule, even in the case of vassals, it lasts for three days and nights. A vassal may only marry by the consent of his lord, who assigns him one of his slave women as a wife.

In complete contrast to the tribes south of the Zambesi, who bury their dead at night in secluded spots near their homes, or under the hedges; the Marutse-Mabundas celebrate their funerals with music, singing, shouting, and firing of guns. Many of them mark the place of interment by depositing on it the hunting-trophies of the deceased, such as the skulls of gazelles and zebras, that during his lifetime have been preserved upon poles. Sometimes trees are planted in an oval form round the grave, which never fails in being protected by some means or other from desecration by wild animals. The ceremonies observed at funerals, itis only reasonable to suppose, are associated with certain ideas of a future existence. Monuments of more elaborate construction are said to exist in the Barotse, the mother country of the dominant tribe, where a