Ivory was the first object of the raiders, women the second, children the third. Ivory was now rapidly rising in value, for the slaughter of fifty thousand elephants in a year makes it scarce. In this region, hitherto unexploited, it was abundant. The natives frequently used it to chop wood upon, or to rest their idols while shaping them with the adze. Being so heavy, two tusks were used to keep their bedding of phrynia leaves from being scattered. They made ivory into pestles to pound their corn, or they stood the tusks on end round their idols, or employed them as seats for their elders in the council-house. Women were needed as wives and servants for the marauders; the little girls could be trained to house-work, and bide the growth of the little boys, with whom eventually they would wive, and who in the mean time would be useful as field hands or for domestic duties. In a village there would probably be found, on an average, ten tusks, good, bad, and indifferent, thirty full-grown women, and fifty children above five years old, besides a few infants. At the first alarm, a scream from a child or a woman, the warriors and their families dash frantically and pell-mell out of their huts. Then from the ambuscade a volley is fired, and a score fall dead or wounded to the ground, whereat the unseen foes leap out of their coverts to despatch the struggling and groaning victims with knife and spear; and some make mad rushes at a group of terrified children; others dart for a likely-looking woman; a few leap in pursuit of a girl who is flying naked from the scene; some chase a lad who bounds like an antelope over the obstructions. Those not engaged in the fierce chase enter the village, and collect to argue over the rights to this or that child. When four or five hundred men rise upon a village whose inhabitants are numerically inferior to them, the event is followed by much fierce discussion of the kind which is not always amicably or easily settled, even when the matter is submitted to the arbitration of the leaders. The rest of the band scatter wildly through the village, and begin collecting the frightened fowls and the bleating goats, rummaging roofs, insides of gourds, and every imaginable place where a poor savage might be likely to hide his little stock of curios and valuables; others manacle the captives, and question them harshly about their neighbors, or indulge in barbarous fun with some decrepid whitehead. When the results of these pillaging expeditions became known in Nyangwé, and the laden canoes disembarked their ivory, slaves, and fat goats of the famous forest breed, it kindled the envy and cupidity of even Tippu Tib and Sayid-bin-Habib. [Illustration: CAPTURING SLAVES]