There Is Also At Every Hut A High Stage Erected
For Drying Manioc Roots And Meal, And Elevated Cages To
Hold domestic fowls.
Round baskets are laid on the thatch of the huts for the hens to lay in,
and
On the arrival of strangers, men, women, and children
ply their calling as hucksters with a great deal of noisy haggling;
all their transactions are conducted with civil banter and good temper.
My men, having the meat of the oxen which we slaughtered from time to time
for sale, were entreated to exchange it for meal; no matter how small
the pieces offered were, it gave them pleasure to deal.
The landscape around is green, with a tint of yellow, the grass long,
the paths about a foot wide, and generally worn deeply in the middle.
The tall overhanging grass, when brushed against by the feet and legs,
disturbed the lizards and mice, and occasionally a serpent,
causing a rustling among the herbage. There are not many birds;
every animal is entrapped and eaten. Gins are seen on both sides of the path
every ten or fifteen yards, for miles together. The time and labor required
to dig up moles and mice from their burrows would, if applied to cultivation,
afford food for any amount of fowls or swine, but the latter
are seldom met with.
We passed on through forests abounding in climbing-plants, many of which
are so extremely tough that a man is required to go in front with a hatchet;
and when the burdens of the carriers are caught, they are obliged
to cut the climbers with their teeth, for no amount of tugging
will make them break. The paths in all these forests are so zigzag
that a person may imagine he has traveled a distance of thirty miles,
which, when reckoned as the crow flies, may not be fifteen.
We reached the River Moamba (lat. 9d 38' S., long. 20d 13' 34" E.)
on the 7th May. This is a stream of thirty yards wide, and, like the Quilo,
Loange, Chikapa, and Loajima, contains both alligators and hippopotami.
We crossed it by means of canoes. Here, as on the slopes
down to the Quilo and Chikapa, we had an opportunity of viewing the geological
structure of the country - a capping of ferruginous conglomerate,
which in many parts looks as if it had been melted, for the rounded nodules
resemble masses of slag, and they have a smooth scale on the surface;
but in all probability it is an aqueous deposit, for it contains
water-worn pebbles of all sorts, and generally small. Below this mass
lies a pale red hardened sandstone, and beneath that a trap-like whinstone.
Lowest of all lies a coarse-grained sandstone containing a few pebbles,
and, in connection with it, a white calcareous rock is occasionally met with,
and so are banks of loose round quartz pebbles. The slopes are longer
from the level country above the further we go eastward,
and every where we meet with circumscribed bogs on them,
surrounded by clumps of straight, lofty evergreen trees,
which look extremely graceful on a ground of yellowish grass.
Several of these bogs pour forth a solution of iron, which exhibits
on its surface the prismatic colors.
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