'The sun having lost his strength, I proceeded, in company with Mr. Hughes, a thoroughly Yorubanized Englishman, to ascend the rocks of Ake, the hill immediately behind the Church Missionary compound ... Ascending a dwarf slope of koko field, we clambered up some rocks, and reached a place where Egugun, literally 'Bones', is worshipped. The king of ghosts here receives sacrifice in honour of the manes of the ancestor in whose behalf the offering is made - it is in fact an African prayer for the dead. The place shows only a dwarf enclosure of red clay walls, whose roof is a gneiss boulder resembling Olumo. It was blackened with smoke, and as we perched there to rest we were curiously inspected from below by the meddlesome Christian populace of Wasimi ... Descending through a dense bush ... we presently entered the mysterious Oro grove: ... The Egbas, like the ancient Persians, and most of the modern pagans, combine a propensity for worshipping in high places with fondness of the concealment which the shady forest affords ... Three dwarf sheds, short smoke-stained mud walls with roofs of decaying palm-leaf, brown and bald, a grassy patch broken here and there by boulders and enclosed within a wall of bush verdure, capped by tall overhanging trees - this was all that met the eye' (Abeokuta, I, pp. 171-4)