The aspirate exists neither in Yao nor Nyanja, and when heard in English words is often turned into _S_; thus the name Hetherwick becomes Salawichi. But the people west of the Shiré use it in words and names borrowed from the Zulus, and seem to find no difficulty with it. _L_ and _R_ are interchangeable, as already stated, or rather it would be more correct to say that the sound intended is really distinct from both and heard by some Europeans as _l_, by others as _r_. There are no very difficult sounds, except perhaps _ng_ (pronounced as in ‘sing’) when it comes at the beginning of a word. There are no clicks in any language used in the region under consideration, except the Zulu spoken by some of the Angoni, and in this they tend to disappear. The accent is almost invariably on the penultimate. The Bantu languages have, of course, no written literature—for we can hardly count the translations, etc., produced by missionaries and their pupils, or even the two or three native newspapers appearing in Cape Colony and Natal. But like most primitive tongues, they are rich in traditional tales, songs, proverbs, etc. Of the folk-stories we shall give some examples in the next chapter. Here are some specimens of Nyanja proverbs:— ‘If you are patient, you will see the eyes of the snail.’ ‘Speed in walking in sand is even.’ (‘_Bei Nacht sind alle Katzen grau._’) ‘You taste things chopped with an axe, but meat cut up with a knife you don’t get a taste of.’ (The sound of the axe directs passers-by to the place where the food is being prepared—perhaps inside the reed-fence of the kraal—when, of course, they must be asked to partake; had a knife been used, they would have heard nothing, and gone on.) ‘If your neighbour’s beard takes fire, quench it for him’—_i.e._ you may need a similar service some day. ‘When a man or a reed dies, there grows up another.’ (‘_Il n’y a pas d’homme nécessaire._’) ‘Sleep has no favourite.’ ‘Lingering met with liers in wait.’ Riddles, as already mentioned, are very popular. They are usually of the simple kind which describes some well-known object in more or less veiled and allusive language, something after the style of ‘Walls there are as white as milk, Lined with skin as soft as silk, Within a fountain crystal-clear, A golden apple doth appear; but much more crudely expressed. ‘I built my house without a door’ is one which has the same answer as the above—viz. ‘an egg.’ Others are:— ‘Spin string that we may cross the river.’—A spider. ‘The people are round about, their chief is in the centre.’—A fire, and the people sitting round it. ‘I saw a chief walking along the road with flour on his head.’—Grey hair. ‘Such an one built his house with one post only.’—A mushroom. ‘A large bird covering its young with its wings.’—A house—referring to the roof with its broad eaves. ‘My child cried on the road.’—A hammer.