By this means, should a marauding party plunder their huts, they save a supply of corn.

They "could give us no information, and they had no food; Chisaka's men had robbed them a few weeks before." "Never mind," said our native Portuguese, "they will sell you plenty when you return, they are afraid of you now, as yet they do not know who you are." We slept under trees in the open air, and suffered no inconvenience from either mosquitoes or dew: 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.