Mr. Moffat,
Who Was As Sorely Tried By Droughts As We Were, And Had His Attention
Directed In The Same Way, Has Noted The Curious Phenomenon Of Thunder
Without Clouds.
Mrs. L. heard it once, but I never had that good fortune.
It is worth the attention of the observant.
Humboldt has seen rain
without clouds, a phenomenon quite as singular. I have been in the vicinity
of the fall of three aerolites, none of which I could afterward discover.
One fell into the lake Kumadau with a report somewhat like
a sharp peal of thunder. The women of the Bakurutse villages there
all uttered a scream on hearing it. This happened at midday,
and so did another at what is called the Great Chuai, which was visible
in its descent, and was also accompanied with a thundering noise.
The third fell near Kuruman, and at night, and was seen as a falling star
by people at Motito and at Daniel's Kuil, places distant forty miles on
opposite sides of the spot. It sounded to me like the report of a great gun,
and a few seconds after, a lesser sound, as if striking the earth
after a rebound. Does the passage of a few such aerolites
through the atmosphere to the earth by day cause thunder without clouds?
We were detained here so long that my tent became again quite rotten.
One of my men, after long sickness, which I did not understand, died here.
He was one of the Batoka, and when unable to walk I had some difficulty
in making his companions carry him. They wished to leave him to die
when his case became hopeless. Another of them deserted to Mozinkwa.
He said that his motive for doing so was that the Makololo had killed
both his father and mother, and, as he had neither wife nor child,
there was no reason why he should continue longer with them.
I did not object to his statements, but said if he should change his mind
he would be welcome to rejoin us, and intimated to Mozinkwa
that he must not be sold as a slave. We are now among people
inured to slave-dealing. We were visited by men who had been as far
as Tete or Nyungwe, and were told that we were but ten days from that fort.
One of them, a Mashona man, who had come from a great distance
to the southwest, was anxious to accompany us to the country of the white men;
he had traveled far, and I found that he had also knowledge
of the English tribe, and of their hatred to the trade in slaves.
He told Sekwebu that the "English were men", an emphasis being put
upon the term MEN, which leaves the impression that others are,
as they express it in speaking scornfully, "only THINGS".
Several spoke in the same manner, and I found that from Mpende's downward
I rose higher every day in the estimation of my own people.
Even the slaves gave a very high character to the English,
and I found out afterward that, when I was first reported at Tete,
the servants of my friend the commandant said to him in joke,
"Ah!
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