South,
And Subsequently Descend It, I Found, After All The Care I Could Bestow,
That The Alterations I Was Able To Make In The Original Native Plan
Were Very Trifling.
The general idea their map gave was wonderfully accurate;
and now I give, in the larger map appended, their views of the other rivers,
in the hope that they may prove helpful to any traveler
who may pursue the investigation farther.
24TH. We remained a day at the village of Moyara. Here the valley
in which the Lekone flows trends away to the eastward, while our course
is more to the northeast. The country is rocky and rough,
the soil being red sand, which is covered with beautiful green trees,
yielding abundance of wild fruits. The father of Moyara
was a powerful chief, but the son now sits among the ruins of the town,
with four or five wives and very few people. At his hamlet a number of stakes
are planted in the ground, and I counted fifty-four human skulls
hung on their points. These were Matebele, who, unable to approach Sebituane
on the island of Loyela, had returned sick and famishing. Moyara's father
took advantage of their reduced condition, and after putting them to death,
mounted their heads in the Batoka fashion. The old man
who perpetrated this deed now lies in the middle of his son's huts,
with a lot of rotten ivory over his grave. One can not help feeling thankful
that the reign of such wretches is over. They inhabited
the whole of this side of the country, and were probably the barrier
to the extension of the Portuguese commerce in this direction. When looking
at these skulls, I remarked to Moyara that many of them were those
of mere boys. He assented readily, and pointed them out as such. I asked
why his father had killed boys. "To show his fierceness," was the answer.
"Is it fierceness to kill boys?" "Yes; they had no business here."
When I told him that this probably would insure his own death if the Matebele
came again, he replied, "When I hear of their coming I shall hide the bones."
He was evidently proud of these trophies of his father's ferocity,
and I was assured by other Batoka that few strangers ever returned
from a visit to this quarter. If a man wished to curry favor
with a Batoka chief, he ascertained when a stranger was about to leave,
and waylaid him at a distance from the town, and when he brought his head
back to the chief, it was mounted as a trophy, the different chiefs
vieing with each other as to which should mount the greatest number of skulls
in his village.
If, as has been asserted, the Portuguese ever had a chain of trading stations
across the country from Caconda to Tete, it must have passed
through these people; but the total ignorance of the Zambesi
flowing from north to south in the centre of the country,
and the want of knowledge of the astonishing falls of Victoria,
which excite the wonder of even the natives, together with
the absence of any tradition of such a chain of stations,
compel me to believe that they existed only on paper.
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