are best obtained from neighbours. The old Congo empire formerly included the countries on the south bank from the coast to Stanley Pool, and southward to the Bunda-speaking people of Ngola (Angola), while homage was rendered by the kings of Loango and Kabinda. To-day the influence of the king is merely nominal outside his town. He is respected, however, in a radius of thirty or forty miles, but seldom if ever interferes in any matters.
San Salvador is situated on a plateau 1,700 feet above the sea, about two-and-a-half miles long by one mile wide. Broad valleys 300 feet deep surround it, and in the south flows the little river Lueji, a tributary of the Lunda-Mpozo.
There are abundant traces of its former importance. The ruins of a stone wall, two feet thick and fifteen feet high, encircle the town. The ruins of the cathedral are very interesting, and show it to have been a very fine building. The material is an ironstone conglomerate, while the lime was burnt from rock in the neighbourhood.
Amid the strong rich grass that covers the plateau exist ruins of some twenty-six buildings, which are said to have been churches, while straight lines of mingomena bushes mark the sites of suburban villas and hamlets. The story runs that the old kings kept up the population of the Mbanza (chief town) by raids into the country. The natives of a town forty miles away would wake up in the morning to find themselves surrounded. As they came out of their houses they would be killed, until there was no further show of resistance; then those who remained would be deported to the capital and be compelled to build there, while many would be sold to the slave-traders on the coast. These days are for ever past. Men-of-war have so closely watched the coast that the slave trade has languished and died, except in Angola, where it exists under a finer name, the slave being considered a ‘Colonial,’ while Portuguese ingenuity and corruption arrange for ‘emigration’ to the islands San Thomé, Principe, and even to the Bissagos.