Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/586

 girls went home with their vessels of water, with a nice piece of palm leaf put on the top of the water to prevent it splashing as they went up the hill side of the bluff on which the town stands. "Where is your brother?" said the mother, and they said they did not know; they thought he was playing with the other children. As the dusk came down and he did not return, the mother went down to the riverside and found all the other children had gone home. She made inquiries but no one knew of him save that he had been playing on the beach. A thorough search was started, but it was five long days before the boy was found, and then his body, decorated with palm leaves, suddenly appeared lying on the beach. It was slit all over longitudinally with long cuts on the face, head, legs, and arms. The crime could not be traced by means convincing to white man's law, but had the witch doctors had the affair in their hands a near relative of the dead boy would have been killed. Those natives who did not share the opinion of this man's guilt said it was the people in the water who had done the thing. These people in the water are much thought of in Cameroon. "They are just the same as people on land, only they live in water."

Doctor Nassau seems to think that the tribal society of the Corisco regions is identical with the leopard societies. He has had considerable experience of the workings of the Ukuku, particularly when he was pioneering in the Benito regions, when it came very near killing him. I will not quote the grand account he gave me of his adventures with it, because I should wish every one to read for themselves the biography he wrote of his first wife, Crowned in Palm Land, for they will find there a series of graphic descriptions of what life really is in the Corisco region, and certainly one of the most powerful and tragic bits of writing in any literature—the description of his wife's death in an open boat out at sea, when he was trying to take her to Gaboon for medical aid.

In reference to Ukuku, he says the name signifies a departed spirit. "It is a secret society into which all the males are initiated at puberty, whose procedure may not be seen by females, nor its laws disobeyed by any one under pain of death,