It is probable that at some remote period the ruling race reached the west coast from the north-east, and imposed their Bantu speech on the rude aborigines, by whom it is still spoken over a wide tract of country on both sides of the Lower Congo. It is an extremely pure and somewhat archaic member of the Bantu family, and W. Holman Bentley, our best authority on the subject, is enthusiastic in praise of its "richness, flexibility, exactness, subtlety of idea, and nicety of expression," a language superior to the people themselves, "illiterate folk with an elaborate and regular grammatical system of speech of such subtlety and exactness of idea that its daily use is in itself an education[272]." Kishi-Kongo has the distinction of being the first Bantu tongue ever reduced to written form, the oldest known work in the language being a treatise on Christian Doctrine published in Lisbon in 1624. Since that time the speech of the "Mociconghi," as Pigafetta calls them[273], has undergone but slight phonetic or other change, which is all the more surprising when we consider the rudeness of the present Mushi-Kongos and others by whom it is still spoken with considerable uniformity. Some of these believe themselves sprung from trees, as if they had still reminiscences of the arboreal habits of a pithecoid ancestry. Amongst the neighbouring _Ba-Mba_, whose sobas were formerly _ex officio_ Commanders-in-chief of the Empire, still dwells a potent being, who is invisible to everybody, and although mortal never dies, or at least after each dissolution springs again into life from his remains gathered up by the priests. All the young men of the tribe undergo a similar transformation, being thrown into a death-like trance by the magic arts of the medicine-man, and then resuscitated after three days. The power of causing the cataleptic sleep is said really to exist, and these strange rites, unknown elsewhere, are probably to be connected with the resurrection of Christ after three days and of everybody on the last day as preached by the early Portuguese evangelists. A volume might be written on the strange distortions of Christian doctrines amongst savage peoples unable to grasp their true inwardness.