I Therefore Told Him That The Heat Was So Great That We Could Not Bear Too Many In The Tent, But That If Bokke, His Favourite, Would Appear, We Should Be Glad To See Her.

Accordingly he departed, and shortly we were honoured by a visit.

Bokke and her daughter were announced, and a prettier pair of savages I never saw. They were very clean; - their hair was worn short, like all the women of the country, and plastered with red ochre and fat, so as to look like vermilion; their faces were slightly tattooed on the cheeks and temples; and they sat down on the many-coloured carpet with great surprise, and stared at the first white man and woman they had ever seen. We gave them both a number of necklaces of red and blue beads, and I secured Bokke's portrait in my sketch book, obtaining a very correct likeness. She told us that Mahommed Her's men were very bad people; that they had burnt and plundered one of her villages; and that one of the Latookas who had been wounded in the fight by a bullet had just died, and they were to dance for him to-morrow, if we would like to attend. She asked many questions; how many wives I had? and was astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This seemed to amuse her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her daughter at the idea. She said that my wife would be much improved if she would extract her four front teeth from the lower jaw, and wear the red ointment on her hair, according to the fashion of the country; she also proposed that she should pierce her under lip, and wear the long pointed polished crystal, about the size of a drawing pencil, that is the "thing" in the Latooka country. No woman among the tribe who has any pretensions to be a "swell" would be without this highly-prized ornament, and one of my thermometers having come to an end I broke the tube into three pieces, and they were considered as presents of the highest value, to be worn through the perforated under lip. Lest the piece should slip through the hole in the lip, a kind of rivet is formed by twine bound round the inner extremity, and this protruding into the space left by the extraction of the four front teeth of the lower jaw, entices the tongue to act upon the extremity, which gives it a wriggling motion, indescribably ludicrous during conversation.

I cannot understand for what reason all the White Nile tribes extract the four front teeth of the lower jaw. Were the meat of the country tender, the loss of teeth might be a trifle; but I have usually found that even a good set of grinders are sometimes puzzled to go through the operation needful to a Latooka beefsteak. It is difficult to explain real beauty; a defect in one country is a desideratum in another; scars upon the face are, in Europe, a blemish; but here and in the Arab countries no beauty can be perfect until the cheeks or temples have been gashed.

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