It is also still true that in the tribes where Njěmbě exists women have much more freedom from control by men than in tribes where it does not exist. But even if it has been thus a defence to women against man's severity, it undeniably has been an injury to them by its indecent ceremonies and phallic songs. Such things may make men fear them, but also make it impossible for men to respect them. Those songs I myself have heard when the Njěmbě camp was in a jungle near to a village. The male generative organ was personified, and, in the song addressed to it, the name of a certain man, who was known by the singers to be at that very time in the adjacent village, was tauntingly referred to. Even immoral men were overwhelmed with shame at the shamelessness of the women. And yet those same women, when their Njěmbě adjourned, resumed in their individual capacities their usual apparent modesty which, as a collective body, they had cast aside. Little has been printed of Njěmbě's secret proceedings more than Dr. Wilson wrote fifty years ago. Paul Du Chaillu makes a short statement that he was allowed to witness a part; and he describes a hut containing a few almost nude old women sitting around some skulls and other fetiches. Doubtless he saw what he asserts. But, unusual as were his opportunities, and large as was his personal influence with his "Camma" (Nkâmi) native chiefs, it is positive that what was shown him was only a little of Njěmbě, if indeed it was Njěmbě at all. Other white men, with, indeed, perhaps less tact than he, but of greater money power and larger trade opportunities, failed to see anything. Some twenty-five years ago two Germans (now dead) trading in the Gabun determined secretly to spy out Njěmbě. The merchant, the head of the trading-house, was a well-educated gentleman, and his clerk was an active, intelligent young man. Both knew native customs well, and both spoke the Mpongwe language fluently. Each had a native wife, and being generous and liberal-handed, had many native friends; but they had been unable to bribe any Njěmbě women, even their own wives, to reveal anything. One dark night when the society was in session in a small jungle not far from their trading-house, they went secretly and cautiously through the bushes. They had not approached near enough to the circle of women around the camp-fire to actually recognize any of them (it would have been difficult to recognize their painted faces even by daylight); and they really did not see anything of what was being done. Somehow their approach was discovered, either by information treacherously carried from some one in their retinue of household servants, or by being seen by one of the pickets of the camp, or by the breaking of a branch as they crept through the trees, or, possibly, by their white odor carried on the wind,--odor which to Africans is almost as distinct as is Negro odor to the white race.