We are promised a start
to-morrow. In the evening, the hunters came in with large supplies of
wallaby. They report innumerable horses and foreigners as having gone to
Kupele; we suppose it to be Goldie's party. From to-day's shooting, the
old man got a green parrot, and devoured it raw. Oriope dressed himself
in his fighting gear, and went through a few antics; he looked a perfect
fiend. He is very proud of a stone club he possesses with a piece broken
off; he says it was broken in felling a tremendous fellow in a
neighbouring village. He killed him. "What, stand before me!"
22_nd_.--I was eating a banana this morning, when I was told not to throw
the skin away, but hand it to them, which I did, when it was passed round
and kissed by all with short ejaculations. I asked what it meant, and
was told it was their manner of thanking the spirits for ripe bananas. We
started at eight a.m. with eight carriers and our old friend, and twenty
inland natives returning home with wallaby; one poor woman had two large
kits on her back, and an infant in another, hanging in front of her.
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