Page:Two kings of Uganda.djvu/51

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AN AFRICAN SMITHY
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weaver ; and I think it takes fully three months to finish a piece of cloth two or three yards in length. When finished it is very strong, and has a dark-coloured border woven in ; the yarn for the border is dyed in a peculiar manner. This cloth is largely worn by the women of Unyamwezi.

Here too I saw for the first time native Africans at work forging iron. Large quantities of wood are collected and burned into charcoal, but no oven of any kind is used. The smithies are grass huts erected over a convenient boulder or out-cropping rock. This forms the anvil, and for a hammer a large round stone is used; but in Buganda the people manufacture their hammers of iron. The ore is smelted in a charcoal furnace, the blast for which is supplied by bellows made out of goat-skin, tied on a piece of hollowed cup-shaped wood ; there is no valve, but a space is left between the clay tube which conducts the blast to the furnace and the aperture in the wooden cup ; the bellows are worked up and down by a vertical stick, round which the skin is gathered in the centre.

It was with the most eager anxiety that we awaited our first view of the great Nyanza, to reach which we had undergone so many toils and such utter weariness. We had visions of looking out upon a vast expanse of sparkling sapphire, and could already hear in imagination the breaking of the waves upon the beach. When the final march of twenty miles was over and we reached the last village before the lake, we felt sure

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