finishing touch to their work by fastening thin bands of grass all over the thatch.
All along the paths, in the courtyards, and especially at the hedges, crowds of inquisitive women with infants in their arms, and clusters of small children around them, had assembled to criticize the makoa (white men) and freely enough they passed their opinions about us. Most of them wore several strings of large dark blue beads round their necks, and the breasts of most of them were bare, although occasionally they had cotton jackets or woollen handkerchiefs, the prevailing colours being red and black; nearly all of them had skirts reaching to the knees, if not to the ankles.
It took us about an hour to make our way through the labyrinth of huts before we entered the glen that contains the town. This glen is about 400 yards wide at its mouth, but gradually converges to a narrow rocky pass; at first sight, indeed, it presented the appearance of a cul-de-sac, but the semblance was only caused by the western side of the steep pass projecting so far as to conceal the eastern, which is covered with rugged crags, and called the monkey-rock. The pass has played an important part in the history of the town.
The mission-house of the London Missionary Society lies on the side of the pass, and as we went towards it we saw three groups of houses on the right, forming the central portion of the town, of which another section lies in arocky hollow on the other side.
