human
and it would not have been decent to pass the palace unvisited. Outside the huts stood a bamboo-girt
gpt
which we visited whilst H.M. was making his toilette, and where, contrary to Congo usage, the women entered with us. Twenty-two boys aged nine or ten showed, by faces whitened with ashes, that they had undergone circumcision, a ceremony which lasts three months: we shall find these Jinkimba in a far wilder state up the Congo. The rival house is the Casa das Tinta, where nubile girls are decorated by the Nganga, or medicine-man, with a greasy crimson-purple pigment and, preparatory to entering the holy state of matrimony, receive an exhaustive lecture upon its physical phases. Father Merolla tells us that the Congoese girls are locked up in pairs for two or three months out of the sight of man, bathing several times a day, and applying
human
the moistened dust of a red wood; without this
gpt
or
human
as they call it, barrenness would be their lot. After betrothal the bride was painted red by the
gpt
for one month, to declare her engagement, and the mask was washed off before nuptials. Hence the
human
Paint House was a very abomination to the good Fathers. Amongst the Timni tribe, near Sierra Leone, the Semo, or initiation for girls, begins with a great dance, called Colungee (Kolangí), and the bride is
gpt
Jeames.