While we were sitting at our tea the last party of returning warriors filed past our house, carrying the limbs of those who had been slain in the fight. Some had human legs over their shoulders, others had threaded arms through slits in the stomachs of their dismembered foes, had tied the ends of the arms together, thus forming loops, and through these ghastly loops they had thrust their own living arms and were carrying them thus with the gory trunks dangling to and fro. The horrible sight was too much for us, and retching badly we had to abandon our meal, and it was some days before we could again eat with any relish. The sight worked on our nerves, and in the night we would start from our sleep, having seen in our dreams exaggerated processions passing before us burdened with sanguinary loads of slain and dismembered bodies. That night Monsembe and the neighbouring towns were given up to cannibal feasts, and the next morning they brought some of the cooked meat to the station, and thinking they were doing us a favour, they offered to share it with us—the meat looked like black boiled pork. We refused their offering with disgust, and told them what we thought of their horrible custom. Long before we settled amongst them we had heard rumours of their cannibalism, but we regarded the tales as more or less mythical; we could no longer now disbelieve the stories we had heard. And later still there came to our ears a very circumstantial report that the folk of the lower part of our district were procuring for their cannibal orgies the natives of a tributary of the Congo. They gave ivory and received human beings in exchange, who quickly found their way to the saucepan; and a white trader was the intermediary. However, as soon as the white folk of the district had gathered such evidence as was irrefutable they brought such pressure to bear on that white trader and his company (the company was not implicated) that the horrible traffic was stopped. That an educated white man could sink so low as to become a wholesale dealer in human flesh to a tribe of African savages is a psychological mystery that I must leave others to solve.