Another afternoon I tested them by putting a heap of sugar, a paper smeared with condensed milk, and a bag of salt tightly wrapped up in tar-paper side by side on the ground. I gave them twenty minutes, and then I found nothing on the sugar, five flies on the milk, and the tar-paper so densely covered with bees that they overlapped one another as when they swarm. For want of anything better, they will fight over a sweaty shirt in the same way; and once, by the banks of a stream, they sent all my carriers howling along the path by creeping up under their loin-cloths. The butterflies seek salt also. If you spread out a damp rag anywhere in tropical Africa, you will soon have brilliant butterflies on it. But if you add a little salt in the Hungry Country, the rag will be a blaze of colors, unless the bees come and drive the butterflies off. As I said, the natives feel the longing too. Among the Chibokwe, the women burn a marsh-grass into a potash powder as a substitute; and if a native squats down in front of you, puts out a long, pink tongue and strokes it appealingly with his finger, you may know it is salt he wants. The scarcity has become worse since the Belgians, following their usual highwayman methods, have robbed the natives of the great salt-pans in the south of the Congo State and made them a trade monopoly. [Illustration: NATIVES BURNING GRASS FOR SALT] In the character of the soil, then, there seemed to be sufficient reason for the name of the country, and I should have been satisfied with it but for distinct evidences that a few spots along the path have been inhabited not so very long ago. Here and there you come upon plants which grow generally or only on the site of deserted villages or fields; such as the atundwa--a plant with branching fronds that smell like walnut leaves. It yields a fruit whose hard and crimson case just projects from the ground and holds a gray bag of seeds, very sour, and almost as good to eat or drink as lemons. But still more definite is the evidence of travellers, like the missionary explorer Mr. Arnot, who first traversed the country over twenty years ago, and has described to me the villages he found there then. There was, for instance, the large Chibokwe town of Peho, which was built round the head of a marsh close upon the main path some two or three days west of Mashiko. You will still find the place marked, about the size of London, on any map of Angola or Africa, but I have looked everywhere for it along the route in vain. A Portuguese once told me he thought it was a few days’ journey north of his house near Mashiko. But he was wrong. The whole place has entirely disappeared, and has less right than Nineveh to a name on a modern map.[1]