The operation is, of course, distinctly painful. The subject sits on the ground or on a log of wood, whilst the operator cuts deeply into the flesh with the knife held at such an angle that a considerable wound will result. Think of sitting still whilst this crude hand-made piece of native steel is dug into the flesh something like twenty or thirty times within half an hour! Once I was able to watch the process; the woman desired a “lace pattern” made from the shoulder blades to the waist, involving altogether four lines, which meant nearly two hundred cuts. She sat outside her hut, and bending down slightly to stretch the skin, the intended pattern was marked in chalk, and then the operator, taking his small cicatrizing knife in his right hand, proceeded to grasp between the thumb and forefinger of the left successive small portions of flesh, gashing each till the blood flowed freely. Then he started the other side of the body, returning again to cut the third line, and back to the second to link the pattern up with the fourth. I watched the woman closely, and as the knife dipped into the flesh she made a grimace, but between the cuts, laughingly and with considerable spirit replied to my comments. At the conclusion of the operation, she calmly walked to the nearest tree and gathered a few leaves to wipe up the blood which by this time was streaming down her body. The operator, according to custom, threw over the wounds a handful of powdered camwood which, however, has less antiseptic than drying properties. [Illustration: CICATRICED WOMEN OF EQUATORVILLE.] [Illustration: THE BANGALLA “RASP” CICATRICE.] It is not easy to light upon such operations, which are generally carried out more or less privately, and in all my years of residence in Africa, this was the only occasion on which I have been able to watch throughout an elaborate cicatrization. It is, however, a familiar sight to meet natives with their bodies newly cut. On the day after the incisions have been made the wounds swell and suppurate, greatly to the delight of the hosts of insect life which swarm everywhere in Central Africa. These surround the wounded body of the native and only by a continuous flicking of grass or twig brushes can the suffering victim obtain even comparative freedom from the tortures which every movement of the body imposes, but in the course of a few months the pattern originally cut in the body stands out firm and clear. In those cases where still more emphatic designs are desired, the cicatrice will be re-opened and raised higher still until the prominence is quite pronounced, in others, after a lapse of a few months, still more lines and still more “knobs” will be added until the age of twenty to thirty. After this the desire for adornment ceases and the body rests from its tortures.