After a comfortable breakfast at the civilian mess hut, and farewells to our kind friends at Fort Salisbury, my wife, Mr. Swan, and I started on our three horses in pursuit of our donkeys, which had started along the Manica road about an hour before. These we soon caught up, and after a hot dusty ride of about ten miles we pitched our tents about one hundred yards from a large Kaffir village on a flat space, hidden away amongst a sea of small granite boulders. Here the women wore pretty chaplets of red and white beads sewn on to snake-skins, and aprons and necklets gaily decorated with the same; the chief had a splendid crop of long black hair. Beyond this the village presented nothing fresh to our notice until night fell, when our rest was disturbed for hours by a series of hideous noises: drums were beaten, dogs were barking, men were howling like wild beasts, and when they ceased the women would take up their refrain, guns were periodically let off, and everything conceivable was done to render night hideous. On rising next morning and inquiring the cause of this nightmare, we were informed that a death had taken place in the village, and that the inhabitants were indulging in their accustomed wailing. I was also told that in these parts they carefully tie up the limbs of a dead man, his toes and his fingers each separately, in cloths, prior to burial, whereas a woman is only tied up in a skin, and her grave is of no account. At the village of Karadi we left the Manica road and entered a very populous district with numerous villages perched on the rocky heights, the inhabitants of which were greatly excited at the sight of us, and followed us for miles. This, we learnt, was Musungaikwa’s country. The women here had a distinct tattoo mark of their own—namely, the lizard pattern, which we have seen on the dollasses or divining-tablets [32]—done in dots on their stomachs. Some of the men, too, have the same device tattooed on them on their chests and backs. This is the third distinctive tattoo mark we have seen in Mashonaland—namely, the furrow pattern around Zimbabwe, the dots in squares in Gambidji’s country, and here the lizard pattern, all of which are raised marks on the skin made by the insertion of some drug. They are evidently connected with some charm, but what the nature of it is I was never able to discover.