Stake or two, squeezes his body in, then plants them again
in their places, so that an enemy coming in the night would find it difficult
to discover the entrance. These palisades seem to indicate
a sense of insecurity in regard to their fellow-men, for there are
no wild beasts to disturb them; the bows and arrows have been
nearly as efficacious in clearing the country here as guns have in the country
farther south. This was a disappointment to us, for we expected
a continuance of the abundance of game in the north which we found
when we first came up to the confluence of the Leeba and Leeambye.
A species of the silver-tree of the Cape (`Leucodendron argenteum')
is found in abundance in the parts through which we have traveled
since leaving Samoana's. As it grows at a height of between two and three
thousand feet above the level of the sea, on the Cape Table Mountain,
and again on the northern slope of the Cashan Mountains,
and here at considerably greater heights (four thousand feet),
the difference of climate prevents the botanical range
being considered as affording a good approximation to the altitude.
The rapid flow of the Leeambye, which once seemed to me
evidence of much elevation of the country from which it comes, I now found,
by the boiling point of water, was fallacious.*
-
* On examining this subject when I returned to Linyanti, I found that,
according to Dr. Arnott, a declivity of three inches per mile
gives a velocity in a smooth, straight channel of three miles an hour.
The general velocity of the Zambesi is three miles and three quarters
per hour, though in the rocky parts it is sometimes as much
as four and a half.
