A separate oven is made for each foot, and formed as follows:--A hole is dug in the ground, considerably larger than the foot which is to be cooked, and a fire is built in it. As soon as it burns up, a large heap of dry wood is piled upon it, and suffered to burn down. When the heap is reduced to a mass of glowing ashes, the Kaffirs scrape out the embers by means of a long pole, each man taking his turn to run to the hole, scrape away until he can endure the heat no longer, and then run away again, leaving the pole for his successor. The hole being freed from embers, the foot is rolled into it, and covered with green leaves and twigs. The hot earth and embers are then piled over the hole, and another great bonfire lighted. As soon as the wood has entirely burned itself out, the operation of baking is considered as complete, and the foot is lifted out by several men furnished with long sharpened poles. By means of this remarkable oven the meat is cooked more thoroughly than could be achieved in any oven of more elaborate construction, the whole of the tendons, the fat, the immature bone, and similar substances being converted into a gelatinous mass, which the African hunter seems to prefer to all other dishes, excepting, perhaps, the marrow taken from the leg bones of the giraffe or eland. Sometimes the trunk is cut into thick slices, and baked at the same time with the feet. Although this part of the elephant may not be remarkable for the excellence of its flavor, it has, at all events, the capability of being made tender by cooking, which is by no means the case with the meat that is usually obtained from the animals which inhabit Southern Africa. Even the skull itself is broken up for the sake of the oily fat which fills the honeycomb-like cells which intervene between the plates of the skull. The rest of the meat is converted into “biltongue,” by cutting it into strips and drying it in the sun, as has already been described. As a general rule, the Kaffirs do not like to leave an animal until they have dried or consumed the whole of the meat. Under the ready spears and powerful jaws of the natives, even an elephant is soon reduced to a skeleton, as may be imagined from the fact that five Kaffirs can eat a buffalo in a day and a half.