KING OLENDA COMES TO RECEIVE ME.--HE IS VERY OLD.--NEVER SAW A MAN SO OLD BEFORE.--HE BEATS HIS KENDO.--HE SALUTES ME WITH HIS KOMBO.--KINGS ALONE CAN WEAR THE KENDO. Olenda village was situated at the top of a high hill. The people, with the exception of a few, had fled. All were afraid to see the moguizi close by them. "How could King Olenda run off, when his great friend Quengueza sent him a moguizi?" shouted Okendjo; "the people will return when they see Olenda facing you." I was led to the onandja, and had scarcely seated myself on a native stool when I heard the sound of the kendo--the king was coming. The kendo was ringing, and no one can possess or ring a kendo but a king. So, at every step the king made the kendo rang, and at last Olenda stood before me. [Illustration: RECEPTION OF THE KING OF THE ASIHRAS.] Never in my life had I seen a man so old; never did I dream that a man could be so old, and I wondered not that his fame had spread far and wide on account of his age. He was a man with wool as white as snow, and his face was a mass of wrinkles. Every rib could be seen, for the skin was like parchment. His body was bent almost double with age, and the legs and arms were like sticks, apparently not bigger than broom-handles. His cheeks were so hollow that the skin seemed to cling to the bones. He had painted with the chalk of the Alumbi his haggard old face, red on one side and white on the other, in streaks, and, as he stood before me, I wondered as much at his appearance as he did at mine. He carried a long stick or cane to support himself. The like I had never seen. He seemed the apparition of some man who had lived in our world a couple of hundred years. When we had gazed at each other (he looking at me with deep little eyes for at least five minutes, and beating his kendo all the time with his palsied hand), he suddenly spoke and said, "I have no bowels; I am like the Ovenga River--I can not be cut in two. I am also like the Niembai and Ovenga Rivers, which unite together. Thus my body is united, and nothing can divide it." This gibberish had some deep mystic significance. It was the regular and invariable salutation of the Ashira kings, Olenda's predecessors, time out of mind. Each chief and important person has such a salutation, which they call _kombo_. I will explain Olenda's kombo to you. If you had before you a map of the countries I have explored in Equatorial Africa, which are published in my larger works, you would see on it the River Ovenga. Olenda means, when he says that he can not be cut in two and is like the River Ovenga, that his body can not be divided any more than the River Ovenga can be cut in twain. The Niembai and Ovenga unite together and form one river, called Rembo; so, if his body was cut in two, it could not be separated, for, as the two rivers unite and form one, so the two parts of his body would reunite again and form one.