And No Prowling Wild
Beast Troubled Us; Though One Evening, While We Were Here, A Native
Sitting With Some Others On The Opposite Bank Was Killed By A
Leopard.
One of the Tette slaves, who wished to be considered a great
traveller, gave us, as we sat by
Our evening fire, an interesting
account of a strange race of men whom he had seen in the interior;
they were only three feet high, and had horns growing out of their
heads; they lived in a large town and had plenty of food. The
Makololo pooh-poohed this story, and roundly told the narrator that
he was telling a downright lie. "WE come from the interior," cried
out a tall fellow, measuring some six feet four, "are WE dwarfs? have
WE horns on our heads?" and thus they laughed the fellow to scorn.
But he still stoutly maintained that he had seen these little people,
and had actually been in their town; thus making himself the hero of
the traditional story, which before and since the time of Herodotus
has, with curious persistency, clung to the native mind. The mere
fact that such absurd notions are permanent, even in the entire
absence of literature, invests the religious ideas of these people
also with importance, as fragments of the wreck of the primitive
faith floating down the stream of time.
We waded across the rapid Luia, which took us up to the waist, and
was about forty yards wide. The water was discoloured at the time,
and we were not without apprehension that a crocodile might chance to
fancy a white man for dinner.
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