We Took Four Elephants' Tusks, Belonging To Sekeletu,
With Us, As A Means Of Testing The Difference Of Prices
Between The Portuguese, Whom We Expected To Reach, And The White Traders
From The South.
Moriantsane supplied us well with honey, milk, and meal.
The rains were just commencing in this district; but, though
Showers
sufficient to lay the dust had fallen, they had no influence whatever
on the amount of water in the river, yet never was there less in any part
than three hundred yards of a deep flowing stream.
Our progress up the river was rather slow; this was caused
by waiting opposite different villages for supplies of food.
We might have done with much less than we got; but my Makololo man, Pitsane,
knew of the generous orders of Sekeletu, and was not at all disposed
to allow them to remain a dead letter. The villages of the Banyeti
contributed large quantities of mosibe, a bright red bean
yielded by a large tree. The pulp inclosing the seed is not much thicker
than a red wafer, and is the portion used. It requires the addition of honey
to render it at all palatable.
To these were added great numbers of the fruit which yields
a variety of the nux vomica, from which we derive that
virulent poison strychnia. The pulp between the nuts is the part eaten,
and it is of a pleasant juicy nature, having a sweet acidulous taste.
The fruit itself resembles a large yellow orange, but the rind is hard,
and, with the pips and bark, contains much of the deadly poison.
They evince their noxious qualities by an intensely bitter taste.
The nuts, swallowed inadvertently, cause considerable pain, but not death;
and to avoid this inconvenience, the people dry the pulp before the fire,
in order to be able the more easily to get rid of the noxious seeds.
A much better fruit, called mobola, was also presented to us. This bears,
around a pretty large stone, as much of the fleshy part as the common date,
and it is stripped off the seeds and preserved in bags in a similar manner
to that fruit. Besides sweetness, the mobola has the flavor of strawberries,
with a touch of nauseousness. We carried some of them, dried as provisions,
more than a hundred miles from this spot.
The next fruit, named mamosho (mother of morning), is the most delicious
of all. It is about the size of a walnut, and, unlike most of the other
uncultivated fruits, has a seed no larger than that of a date.
The fleshy part is juicy, and somewhat like the cashew-apple,
with a pleasant acidity added. Fruits similar to those which
are here found on trees are found on the plains of the Kalahari,
growing on mere herbaceous plants. There are several other examples
of a similar nature. Shrubs, well known as such in the south,
assume the rank of trees as we go to the north; and the change
is quite gradual as our latitude decreases, the gradations being
herbaceous plants, shrubs, bushes, small, then large trees.
But it is questionable if, in the cases of mamosho, mobola, and mawa,
the tree and shrub are identical, though the fruits so closely
resemble each other; for I found both the dwarf and tree in the same latitude.
There is also a difference in the leaves, and they bear at different seasons.
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