Where slave-traders have been in the habit of coming,
they present food, then demand three or four times its value as a custom.
We were now rather glad to get past villages without intercourse
with the inhabitants.
We were traveling W.N.W., and all the rivulets we here crossed
had a northerly course, and were reported to fall into the Kasai or Loke;
most of them had the peculiar boggy banks of the country.
As we were now in the alleged latitude of the Coanza,
I was much astonished at the entire absence of any knowledge of that river
among the natives of this quarter. But I was then ignorant of the fact
that the Coanza rises considerably to the west of this,
and has a comparatively short course from its source to the sea.
The famous Dr. Lacerda seems to have labored under the same mistake as myself,
for he recommended the government of Angola to establish a chain of forts
along the banks of that river, with a view to communication
with the opposite coast. As a chain of forts along its course would lead
southward instead of eastward, we may infer that the geographical data
within reach of that eminent man were no better than those according to which
I had directed my course to the Coanza where it does not exist.
26TH. We spent Sunday on the banks of the Quilo or Kweelo,
here a stream of about ten yards wide. It runs in a deep glen,
the sides of which are almost five hundred yards of slope,
and rocky, the rocks being hardened calcareous tufa lying on
clay shale and sandstone below, with a capping of ferruginous conglomerate.
The scenery would have been very pleasing, but fever took away
much of the joy of life, and severe daily intermittents rendered me
very weak and always glad to recline.
As we were now in the slave-market, it struck me that the sense of insecurity
felt by the natives might account for the circumstance that those
who have been sold as slaves and freed again, when questioned,
profess to like the new state better than their primitive one.
They lived on rich, fertile plains, which seldom inspire that love of country
which the mountains do. If they had been mountaineers, they would have
pined for home. To one who has observed the hard toil of the poor
in old civilized countries, the state in which the inhabitants here live
is one of glorious ease. The country is full of little villages.
Food abounds, and very little labor is required for its cultivation;
the soil is so rich that no manure is required; when a garden
becomes too poor for good crops of maize, millet, etc.,
the owner removes a little farther into the forest, applies fire
round the roots of the larger trees to kill them, cuts down the smaller,
and a new, rich garden is ready for the seed.
