This python must have
been over 40 feet. I have not a shadow of doubt it was. Stay-at-
home people will always discredit great measurements, but
experienced bushmen do not, and after all, if it amuses the stay-at-
homes to do so, by all means let them; they have dull lives of it
and it don't hurt you, for you know how exceedingly difficult it is
to preserve really big things to bring home, and how, half the time,
they fall into the hands of people who would not bother their heads
to preserve them in a rotting climate like West Africa.
The largest python skin I ever measured was a damaged one, which was
26 feet. There is an immense one hung in front of a house in San
Paul de Loanda which you can go and measure yourself with
comparative safety any day, and which is, I think, over 20 feet. I
never measured this one. The common run of pythons is 10-15 feet,
or rather I should say this is about the sized one you find with
painful frequency in your chicken-house.
Of the Lubuku secret society I can speak with no personal knowledge.
I had a great deal of curious information regarding it from a Bakele
woman, who had her information second-hand, but it bears out what
Captain Latrobe Bateman says about it in his most excellent book The
First Ascent of the Kasai (George Phillip, 1889), and to his account
in Note J of the Appendix, I beg to refer the ethnologist.
