They Carried Their Paddles With Them,
And, As The Makololo Suggested, Were Able To Swim Over The Rivers By Night
And Steal Canoes, If The Inhabitants Should Be So Unreasonable As To Refuse
To Lend Them.
These different parties assorted together into messes;
any orders were given through their head man, and when food was obtained
he distributed it to the mess.
Each party knew its own spot
in the encampment; and as this was always placed so that our backs
should be to the east, the direction from whence the prevailing winds came,
no time was lost in fixing the sheds of our encampment. They each
took it in turn to pull grass to make my bed, so I lay luxuriously.
NOVEMBER 26TH. As the oxen could only move at night,
in consequence of a fear that the buffaloes in this quarter
might have introduced the tsetse, I usually performed the march by day
on foot, while some of the men brought on the oxen by night.
On coming to the villages under Marimba, an old man, we crossed the Unguesi,
a rivulet which, like the Lekone, runs backward. It falls into the Leeambye
a little above the commencement of the rapids. The stratified gneiss,
which is the underlying rock of much of this part of the country,
dips toward the centre of the continent, but the strata are often
so much elevated as to appear nearly on their edges. Rocks of augitic trap
are found in various positions on it; the general strike is north and south;
but when the gneiss was first seen, near to the basalt of the falls,
it was easterly and westerly, and the dip toward the north,
as if the eruptive force of the basalt had placed it in that position.
We passed the remains of a very large town, which, from the only
evidence of antiquity afforded by ruins in this country, must have been
inhabited for a long period; the millstones of gneiss, trap, and quartz
were worn down two and a half inches perpendicularly. The ivory grave-stones
soon rot away. Those of Moyara's father, who must have died
not more than a dozen years ago, were crumbling into powder;
and we found this to be generally the case all over the Batoka country.
The region around is pretty well covered with forest; but there is
abundance of open pasturage, and, as we are ascending in altitude,
we find the grass to be short, and altogether unlike the tangled herbage
of the Barotse valley.
It is remarkable that we now meet with the same trees we saw in descending
toward the west coast. A kind of sterculia, which is the most common tree
at Loanda, and the baobab, flourish here; and the tree called moshuka,
which we found near Tala Mungongo, was now yielding its fruit, which resembles
small apples. The people brought it to us in large quantities:
it tastes like a pear, but has a harsh rind, and four large seeds within.
We found prodigious quantities of this fruit as we went along.
The tree attains the height of 15 or 20 feet, and has leaves, hard and glossy,
as large as one's hand.
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