Many, if bleached, might pass for Europeans, so
"Caucasian" are their features; few are negro in type as the
Mpongwe, and none are purely "nigger" like the blacks of maritime
Guinea and the lower Congoese. And they bear the aspect of a
people fresh from the bush, the backwoods; their teeth are
pointed, and there is generally a look of grotesqueness and
surprise. When I drank tea, they asked what was the good of
putting sugar in tobacco water. The hair is not kinky,
peppercorn-like, and crisply woolly, like that of the Coast
tribes; in men, as well as in women, it falls in a thick curtain,
nearly to the shoulders, and it is finer than the usual
elliptical fuzz. The variety of their perruquerie can be rivalled
only by that of the dress and ornament. The males affect plaits,
knobs, and horns, stiff twists and upright tufts, suddenly
projecting some two inches from the scalp; and, that analogies
with Europe might not be wanting, one gentleman wore a queue,
zopf, or pigtail, bound at the shoulders, not by a ribbon, but by
the neck of a claret bottle. Other heads are adorned with single
feathers, or bunches and circles of plumes, especially the red
tail-plumes of the parrot and the crimson coat of the Touraco
(Corythrix), an African jay; these blood-coloured spoils are a
sign of war.
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