The “Tembe” wants but the addition of white-wash to make it an effective feature in African scenery: as it is, it appears from afar like a short line of raised earth. Provided with a block-house at each angle to sweep dead ground where fire, the only mode of attack practised in these regions, can be applied, it would become a fort impregnable to the Eastern African. The form is a hollow square or oblong, generally irregular, with curves, projections, and semicircles; in the East African Ghauts, the shape is sometimes round or oval to suit the exigencies of the hill-sides and the dwarf cones upon which it is built. On the mountains and in Ugogo, where timber is scarce, the houses form the continued frontage of the building, which, composed of mimosa-trunks, stout stakes, and wattle and dab, rarely exceeds seven feet in height. In the southern regions of Usagara where the Tembe is poorest, the walls are of clods loosely put together and roofed over with a little straw. About Msene where fine trees abound, the Tembe is surrounded by a separate boma or palisade of young unbarked trunks, short or tall, and capped here and there with cattle-skulls, blocks of wood, grass-wisps, and similar talismans; this stockade, in damper places, is hedged with a high thick fence, sometimes doubled and trebled, of peagreen milk-bush, which looks pretty and refreshing, and is ditched outside with a deep trench serving as a drain. The cleared space in front of the main passage through the hedges is often decorated with a dozen poles, placed in a wide semicircle to support human skulls, the mortal remains of ill-conducted boors. In some villages the principal entrance is approached by long, dark and narrow lanes of palisading. When the settlement is built purely for defence, it is called “Kaya,” and its headman “Muinyi Kaya,” the word, however, is sometimes used for “Boma” or “Mji,” a palisaded village in general. In some parts of Unyamwezi there is a Bandani or exterior boothy, where the men work at the forge, or sit in the shade, and where the women husk, pound, and cook their grain.