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the chase and the preparation of palm-wine, hence are regarded by their Bantu friends as benevolent little people whose special mission is to provide the surrounding tribes with game and palm-wine in exchange for manioc, maize, and bananas. Many are distinguished by sharp powers of observation, amazing talent for mimicry, and a good memory. Junker describes the comic ways and nimble action of an Akka who imitated with marvelous fidelity the peculiarities of persons he had once seen—Moslems at prayer, Emin Pasha with his 'four eyes' (spectacles), another in a towering rage, storming and abusing everybody, and Junker himself, 'whom he took off to the life, rehearsing down to the minutest details, and with surprising accuracy, my anthropometric performance when measuring his body at Rumbek four years before.'"—A. H. Keane, The World's Peoples, 148-9.
"Dwarfs of the Southern Countries" acting as temple guards.
From a relief in the Temple of Bubastis.
PYGMIES
Homer, Iliad III, 6—Chapman's translation:
"At all parts like the cranes that fill, with harsh confusion.
Of brutish clanges all the air and in ridiculous war
(Eschewing the unsuffer'd storms, shot from the winter's star),
Visit the ocean, and confer the Pygmei soldiers' death."
Aristotle: "The cranes go up as far as the lakes above Egypt, where the Nile originates; there the pygmies are living; and this is not a fable, but pure truth; men and horses are, as they say, of small stature, and live in grottoes."
