The favourite feminine necklace is a row of sharks’ teeth; some use beads, others bits of copal, but the amber so highly valued in the Somali country is here not prized. I have alluded before to the artificial deformity of ear-lobes distended by means of the Mpogo, a mixture of raw Copal (Chakazi) and Cinnabar. The left nostril is usually honoured with some simple decoration—a stud or rose-shaped button of wood or bone, of ivory or of precious metal, and at times its place is taken by a clove or a pin of Cassava. The tattoo is not so common on the Island as upon the Continent. These women are said to be prolific, but apparently they have small families: the child is carried in a cloth called Mbereko, and, curious to say, they do not bind up its head immediately after birth. They are hard-worked; and, like the dames of Harar, they buy and sell with men in the bazar. Their food is manioc, holcus, rice, and sometimes fish; a fowl is the extent of luxury, flesh being mostly beyond their means. Few smoke, but almost all chew tobacco as lustily as their husbands, and their mouths are horrid chasms full of ‘Tambúl’—quids of betel-nut and areca leaf peppered with coarse shell- lime.[108] This astringent, like the Kola-nut of the Guinea Regions, acts preventive against the effect of damp heat, and it is a stomachic, consequently a tonic. The habit of ‘chawing’ it becomes inveterate: Hindostanis visiting Portugal, and unable to procure the favourite ‘Pán- Supári,’ have imitated it with cuttings of cypress-apples and ivy leaves. Ibn Batuta declares the betel to be highly aphrodisiac, and hence partly the high esteem in which this masticatory is held. The Wasawahili are not an honoured race; even the savage Somal call them ’Abíd, or serviles, and bitterly deride their peculiarities. The unerring instinct of mankind has pointed them out for slaves, and they have readily accepted the position. As Moslems they should be free, and the Faith forbids them to trade in Moslems. Yet by local usage, as the children become the property not of the parents, but of the mother’s brother, the latter can sell any or all of his nephews and nieces; indeed, he would be subject to popular contempt if, when poor, he did not thus ‘raise the wind.’