Albert, Lake (Congo and Uganda); Nile River; Sudan -- Description and travel
should be glad to see her. Accordingly he departed, and shortly we were
honored by a visit.
*Bokke* and her daughter were announced, and a pair of prettier savages
I never saw. They were very clean; their hair was worn short, like that
of all the women of the country, and plastered with red ochre and fat
so as to look like vermilion; their faces were slightly tattooed on the
cheeks and temples, and they sat down on the many-colored carpet with
great surprise, and stared at the first white man and woman they had
ever seen. We gave them both a number of necklaces of red and blue
beads, and I secured Bokke's portrait in my sketch-book, obtaining a
very correct likeness. She told us that Mahommed Her's men were very bad
people; that they had burned and plundered one of her villages; and that
one of the Latookas who had been wounded in the fight by a bullet had
just died, and they were to dance for him to-morrow; if we would like to
we could attend. She asked many questions; among others, how many wives
I had, and was astonished to hear that I was contented with one.
This seemed to amuse her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her
daughter at the idea. She said that my wife would be much improved if
she would extract her four front teeth from the lower jaw and wear the
red ointment on her hair, according to the fashion of the country; she
also proposed that she should pierce her under lip, and wear the long
pointed polished crystal, about the size of a drawing-pencil, that is
the "thing" in the Latooka country. No woman among the tribe who has
any pretensions to being a "swell" would be without this highly-prized
ornament; and one of my thermometers having come to an end, I broke
the tube into three pieces, and they were considered as presents of the
highest value, to be worn through the perforated under lip. Lest the
piece should slip through the hole in the lip, a kind of rivet is formed
by twine bound round the inner extremity, and this, protruding into the
space left by the extraction of the four front teeth of the lower jaw,
entices the tongue to act upon the extremity, which gives it a wriggling
motion indescribably ludicrous during conversation.
It is difficult to explain real beauty. A defect in one country is a
desideratum in another. Scars upon the face are, in Europe, a blemish;
but here and in the Arab countries no beauty can be perfect until the
cheeks or temples have been gashed. The Arabs make three gashes upon
each cheek, and rub the wounds with salt and a kind of porridge
(asida) to produce proud-flesh; thus every female slave captured by the
slave-hunters is marked to prove her identity and to improve her charms.
Each tribe has its peculiar fashion as to the position and form of the
cicatrix.
The Latookas gash the temples and cheeks of their women, but do not
raise the scar above the surface, as is the custom of the Arabs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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