very elaborate head dress consisting of many coloured beads twisted and plaited into their hair, the amount of time and patience required by the barbers being enormous. It appears that the four French traders, who were massacred a few weeks ago, had two factories, one close to the river and one further inland. In the latter was a large stock of arms and ammunition. These were hastily abandoned and the natives then seized them and attacked the factory on the river. All four white men were killed and it is feared that two were first tied to trees and tortured. A punitive expedition has been sent against the tribe who are now armed with these modern rifles and the moral of the story is obviously that it is very dangerous to permit traders to import and sell arms at all. One night I was awakened and saw the boys dancing excitedly about the fire and in front of my tent. Having asked the matter, Chikaia, whose zoological knowledge is very limited, replied _il est la petite bête_. This sounded like mosquitoes so, having tucked in my net more closely, I turned round to sleep. A few minutes afterwards, Lord Mountmorres appeared shouting with pain and mounting a chair in front of my tent rapidly peeled off his clothes. He said his bed was full of great black ants which had fixed on his skin and were biting him all over. Millions of these pests indeed were on the camping ground but had as yet not reached my tent. Hastily pulling on high boots and covering myself from head to foot, I cautiously crept out of the tent and found the ground black with ants. It was impossible to kill them by stamping about for they were simply driven into the soft sand and wriggled out again the moment the foot was withdrawn. We were evidently in the line of march of a migrating host and were forced to beat a hasty retreat leaving the insects in full possession. There is no drinking water at Songo, so we had to boil and filter that from the river. This proved very difficult, for even after allowing it to settle and then carefully decanting it, there was so much mud left, that the pores of the porcelain candles in the filters frequently became blocked. We had therefore to be content with muddy water well boiled. As we had a fair amount of baggage, we required sixty or seventy paddlers and it was not easy to find so many. At length however, after searching on both sides of the river, crews were collected for three large canoes and we arranged to continue our journey on September 14th.