The Wasagara of Rumuma are short, black, beardless men. They wear their hair combed off the forehead, and twisted into a fringe of little pig-tails, which extend to the nape of the neck. Few boast of cloth, the general body contenting themselves with a goat-skin flap somewhat like a cobbler’s apron tied over one shoulder, as we sling a game-bag. Their ornaments are zinc and brass earrings in rolls, which distend the ear-lobe, bangles, or armlets of similar metal, and iron chains with oblong links as anklets. Their arms are bows and arrows, assegais with long lanceated heads, and bull-hide shields, three feet long by one broad, painted black and red in perpendicular stripes. I was visited by their Sultan Njasa, a small grizzled old man, with eyes reddened by liquor, a wide mouth, a very thin beard, a sooty skin, and long straggling hair, “_à la malcontent_.” He was attired in an antiquated Barsati, or blue and red Indian cotton, tucked in at the waist, with another thrown over his shoulders, and his neck was decked with many strings of beads. He insisted upon making “sare” or brotherhood with Said bin Salim, who being forbidden by his law to taste blood, made the unconscientious Muinyi Wazira his proxy. The two brothers being seated on the ground opposite each other, with legs well to the fore, one man held over their heads a drawn sword, whilst another addressed to them alternately a little sermon, denouncing death or slavery as the penalty for proving false to the vow. Then each brother licked a little of the other’s blood, taken with the finger from a knife-cut above the heart, or rather where the heart is popularly supposed to be. The Sultan then presented to the Muinyi, _in memoriam_, a neat iron chain-anklet, and the Muinyi presented to the Sultan a little of our cloth.