When in later years I went to live among the Bangalas on the Upper River, I found that they held as strange theories about the remoter peoples higher up, or north and south of them. They would tell of monsters down south whose chief was a woman[1] with a white skin that shone so fiercely that the eyes of those who looked on her were scorched; or of people away north who lived in trees and ate raw flesh, etc., because they did not know how to make a fire; or of folk far away in the watery west who lived half their time in the water and had webbed feet like ducks. It would seem as though folk of all climes, of all ages, and of all degrees of civilization have amused themselves by peopling unknown regions with mythical monsters—Cyclops, men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, centaurs, mermaids, etc., and that even the savages of barbarous Africa beguiled the long evenings around their fires by conjuring up freaks in nature, like the more learned ancients, to inhabit the countries beyond their ken. Footnote 1: Had the fact that some portions of South Africa were governed by a woman—Queen Victoria—filtered through the tribes in this distorted fashion? There is another peculiarity of the natives, worthy, perhaps, of notice in this connection: those who live on the coast always refer to the hinterland folk in contemptuous terms as “bush-people,” i.e. ignorant, dull, slow in the up-take, or as we say, country yokels, clod-hoppers. When you arrive in the hinterland you find that dwellers in the large towns speak of those who live in the villages and hamlets as “bush-people,” and they put into their tones such contempt that one is surprised to find that they belong to the same tribe and speak the same language. Arriving on the Upper River you find also that all riverine peoples speak of the interior folk—those living away from the river—as “bush-people,” and utterly beneath their notice. There is no more opprobrious phrase that can be flung at a native than to call him a “bush-man” in a language that he understands. He will resent it, and if there is the slightest chance of success he will fight over it. In June, 1890, after having lived on the Lower Congo at San Salvador and Matadi for nine years, I started for the Upper Congo for the purpose of seeking out a new site for missionary effort amongst the natives of a new tribe and language. Between the last navigable point on the Lower Congo, Matadi, and the commencement of the navigable water on the Upper Congo, Stanley Pool, there were 240 miles of very bad, rough road.