This district lies between the Kirk Mountains on the west and the Zomba range on the east, and the part I am thinking of is a fertile plain, slightly undulating in parts and crossed by two good-sized streams, which slopes down from the western mountains to the river. As you look from the hill on which our house stood, you see a wide level—green during the rains, yellow when the grass is dry, with patches of bush here and there and one grove of great trees plainly in sight—the _nkalango_, where the dead are buried. Here and there, dotted about the plain, are little groups of huts, several of which, taken together, may be held to constitute a village. Each group, as a rule, contains one family (_i.e._ husband and wife or wives with their children), and is enclosed in a stout fence of grass and reeds, woven as closely as matting, and tall enough to keep any ordinary wild beast from leaping over. There is a door to this enclosure, but, not being on hinges, it is usually invisible in the daytime, as the people take it down, and, as often as not, lay it on some short posts fixed in the ground, and use it as a table, on which they can spread out grain or other things to dry. At night the door is fastened by cross-bars, and perhaps thorn-bushes are stuck in at the sides to give additional security. Inside the enclosure stand the round huts, with their conical thatched roofs—three, four, or more, according to the number of the family. Between them are the corn-bins, called _nkokwe_—in a small enclosure only one, or perhaps two. In the picture, which is that of a Yao village near Domasi, several of these _nkokwe_ are to be seen—one with the top off—but they do not look as neat as one often sees them. They are like huge round baskets, woven of split bamboo, seven or eight feet high, without top or bottom, raised from the ground on a low platform roughly floored with small logs, and covered with a conical roof like those of the huts, but not fastened down, so that it can be tilted up by means of a stick, or taken off altogether when corn is wanted. They are reached by a primitive ladder made of two poles, and cross-pieces lashed between them with bark. This Yao village is in several ways different from the one I am describing. It is larger, and, being in a more settled district, not enclosed in a fence, though some of the huts may have a semicircular one before the door, to screen it from the wind. The houses, too, are many of them square, a fashion introduced, in some places by Europeans, in others by coast people.