ba withdrew,
promising that a gang of at least fifty should be at the ruined temple--
or whatever it was--"before the sun reached the top of the sky;" in
other words, before noon. This promise was faithfully fulfilled, for at
eleven o'clock the explorers saw the gang of labourers come filing in
among the ruins, armed with rude wooden mattocks and spades, and
provided with large baskets in which to convey away the soil as it was
dug out. They were as unprepossessing a lot of specimens of female
humanity as could well be imagined. Naked, save for a filthy ragged
skin petticoat round their waists and reaching to the knee, their faces
wore, without exception, an expression of sullen stupidity, and they
looked as though they had never experienced a joyous moment in their
lives; but they were active and muscular, and soon showed that they
thoroughly understood how to use their clumsy tools to the best
advantage. They were led by and worked under the directorship of a
lean, shrunken, withered old grey-haired hag of superlative ugliness,
who did no work herself, but went constantly back and forth along the
line of workers, bearing in her hand a long thin pliant rattan, which
she did not hesitate to smartly apply to the shoulders of those who
seemed to her to be doing less than their fair share of the work in
hand. This bit of petty cruelty was, however, as a matter of course,
promptly stopped by the professor, who thereby won for himself a look of
withering scorn from the hag aforesaid, and glances of stupid wonder--in
which in some cases could be also detected faint traces of an expression
of gratitude--from the unfortunate sisterhood who laboured under her.

The amount of work performed was, as might naturally be expected,
nothing approaching to that which would have been accomplished in the
same time by the same number of white labourers; indeed, a gang of half
a dozen good honest hard-working English navvies would have accomplished
fully as much per diem as the fifty women who laboured among the ruins.
But the explorers were quite satisfied; they were in no particular
hurry; the climate was delightful; M'Bongwele was wonderfully civil,
sending large supplies of provisions, fruit, and milk to the ship daily,
accompanied by the most solicitous inquiries through Lualamba as to
whether all things were going well with his visitors. There was no
attempt whatever, so far as they could discover, to pry into their
doings, not