"We like you," they said, "but we wish
you would give up this everlasting preaching and praying. You see that
we never get any rain, while the tribes who never pray have an abundance."
Livingstone could not deny the fact, and he was sometimes disposed
to attribute it to the malevolence of the "Prince of the Power of the Air",
eager to frustrate the good work.
The people behaved wonderfully well, though the scarcity amounted
almost to famine. The women sold their ornaments to buy corn
from the more fortunate tribes around; the children scoured the country
for edible roots; the men betook themselves to hunting. They constructed
great traps, called `hopos', consisting of two lines of hedges, a mile long,
far apart at the extremities, but converging like the sides of the letter V,
with a deep pit at the narrow end. Then forming a circuit for miles around,
they drove the game - buffaloes, zebras, gnus, antelopes, and the like -
into the mouth of the hopo, and along its narrowing lane,
until they plunged pell-mell in one confused, writhing, struggling mass
into the pit, where they were speared at leisure.
The precarious mode of life occasioned by the long drought interfered sadly
with the labors of the mission. Still worse was the conduct of Boers
who had pushed their way into the Bechuana country.
