He Offered To Give Me
As Much Ivory As I Needed Without Going To That Chief;
But When I Refused
To take any, he unwillingly consented to give me guides.
Next day, however, when Oswell and I were prepared to
Start,
with the horses only, we received a senseless refusal; and like Sekomi,
who had thrown obstacles in our way, he sent men to the Bayeiye with orders
to refuse us a passage across the river. Trying hard to form a raft
at a narrow part, I worked many hours in the water; but the dry wood
was so worm-eaten it would not bear the weight of a single person.
I was not then aware of the number of alligators which exist in the Zouga,
and never think of my labor in the water without feeling thankful
that I escaped their jaws. The season was now far advanced;
and as Mr. Oswell, with his wonted generous feelings, volunteered,
on the spot, to go down to the Cape and bring up a boat,
we resolved to make our way south again.
Coming down the Zouga, we had now time to look at its banks.
These are very beautiful, resembling closely many parts of the River Clyde
above Glasgow. The formation is soft calcareous tufa,
such as forms the bottom of all this basin. The banks are perpendicular
on the side to which the water swings, and sloping and grassy on the other.
The slopes are selected for the pitfalls designed by the Bayeiye
to entrap the animals as they come to drink. These are about
seven or eight feet deep, three or four feet wide at the mouth,
and gradually decrease till they are only about a foot wide at the bottom.
The mouth is an oblong square (the only square thing made by the Bechuanas,
for every thing else is round), and the long diameter at the surface
is about equal to the depth. The decreasing width toward the bottom
is intended to make the animal wedge himself more firmly in
by his weight and struggles. The pitfalls are usually in pairs,
with a wall a foot thick left uncut between the ends of each,
so that if the beast, when it feels its fore legs descending,
should try to save itself from going in altogether by striding the hind legs,
he would spring forward and leap into the second with a force
which insures the fall of his whole body into the trap.
They are covered with great care. All the excavated earth is removed
to a distance, so as not to excite suspicion in the minds of the animals.
Reeds and grass are laid across the top; above this the sand is thrown,
and watered so as to appear exactly like the rest of the spot.
Some of our party plumped into these pitfalls more than once,
even when in search of them, in order to open them to prevent
the loss of our cattle. If an ox sees a hole, he carefully avoids it;
and old elephants have been known to precede the herd and whisk off
the coverings of the pitfalls on each side all the way down to the water.
We have known instances in which the old among these sagacious animals
have actually lifted the young out of the trap.
The trees which adorn the banks are magnificent. Two enormous baobabs
(`Adansonia digitata'), or mowanas, grow near its confluence with the lake
where we took the observations for the latitude (20d 20' S.).
We were unable to ascertain the longitude of the lake,
as our watches were useless; it may be between 22 Deg. and 23 Deg. E.
The largest of the two baobabs was 76 feet in girth.
The palmyra appears here and there among trees not met with in the south.
The mokuchong, or moshoma, bears an edible fruit of indifferent quality,
but the tree itself would be a fine specimen of arboreal beauty
in any part of the world. The trunk is often converted into canoes.
The motsouri, which bears a pink plum containing a pleasant acid juice,
resembles an orange-tree in its dark evergreen foliage, and a cypress
in its form. It was now winter-time, and we saw nothing of the flora.
The plants and bushes were dry; but wild indigo abounded, as indeed it does
over large tracts of Africa. It is called mohetolo, or the "changer",
by the boys, who dye their ornaments of straw with the juice.
There are two kinds of cotton in the country, and the Mashona,
who convert it into cloth, dye it blue with this plant.
We found the elephants in prodigious numbers on the southern bank.
They come to drink by night, and after having slaked their thirst -
in doing which they throw large quantities of water over themselves,
and are heard, while enjoying the refreshment, screaming with delight -
they evince their horror of pitfalls by setting off in a straight line
to the desert, and never diverge till they are eight or ten miles off.
They are smaller here than in the countries farther south.
At the Limpopo, for instance, they are upward of twelve feet high;
here, only eleven: farther north we shall find them nine feet only.
The koodoo, or tolo, seemed smaller, too, than those we had been
accustomed to see. We saw specimens of the kuabaoba,
or straight-horned rhinoceros (`R. Oswellii'), which is a variety
of the white (`R. simus'); and we found that, from the horn being
projected downward, it did not obstruct the line of vision,
so that this species is able to be much more wary than its neighbors.
We discovered an entirely new species of antelope, called leche or lechwi.
It is a beautiful water-antelope of a light brownish-yellow color.
Its horns - exactly like those of the `Aigoceros ellipsiprimnus',
the waterbuck, or tumogo, of the Bechuanas - rise from the head with
a slight bend backward, then curve forward at the points.
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