The State Of Insecurity In Which The Badema Tribe Live Is Indicated
By The Habit Of Hiding Their Provisions In
The hills, and keeping
only a small quantity in their huts; they strip a particular species
of tree of its
Bitter bark, to which both mice and monkeys are known
to have an antipathy, and, turning the bark inside out, sew it into
cylindrical vessels for their grain, and bury them in holes and in
crags on the wooded hill-sides. By this means, should a marauding
party plunder their huts, they save a supply of corn. They "could
give us no information, and they had no food; Chisaka's men had
robbed them a few weeks before."
"Never mind," said our native Portuguese, "they will sell you plenty
when you return, they are afraid of you now, as yet they do not know
who you are." We slept under trees in the open air, and suffered no
inconvenience from either mosquitoes or dew: and no prowling wild
beast troubled us; though one evening, while we were here, a native
sitting with some others on the opposite bank was killed by a
leopard.
One of the Tette slaves, who wished to be considered a great
traveller, gave us, as we sat by our evening fire, an interesting
account of a strange race of men whom he had seen in the interior;
they were only three feet high, and had horns growing out of their
heads; they lived in a large town and had plenty of food. The
Makololo pooh-poohed this story, and roundly told the narrator that
he was telling a downright lie. "WE come from the interior," cried
out a tall fellow, measuring some six feet four, "are WE dwarfs? have
WE horns on our heads?" and thus they laughed the fellow to scorn.
But he still stoutly maintained that he had seen these little people,
and had actually been in their town; thus making himself the hero of
the traditional story, which before and since the time of Herodotus
has, with curious persistency, clung to the native mind. The mere
fact that such absurd notions are permanent, even in the entire
absence of literature, invests the religious ideas of these people
also with importance, as fragments of the wreck of the primitive
faith floating down the stream of time.
We waded across the rapid Luia, which took us up to the waist, and
was about forty yards wide. The water was discoloured at the time,
and we were not without apprehension that a crocodile might chance to
fancy a white man for dinner. Next day one of the men crawled over
the black rocks to within ten yards of a sleeping hippopotamus, and
shot him through the brain. The weather being warm, the body floated
in a few hours, and some of us had our first trial of hippopotamus
flesh. It is a cross-grained meat, something between pork and beef,-
-pretty good food when one is hungry and can get nothing better.
When we reached the foot of the mountain named Chipereziwa, whose
perpendicular rocky sides are clothed with many-coloured lichens, our
Portuguese companion informed us there were no more obstructions to
navigation, the river being all smooth above; he had hunted there and
knew it well. Supposing that the object of our trip was accomplished
we turned back; but two natives, who came to our camp at night,
assured us that a cataract, called Morumbwa, did still exist in
front. Drs. Livingstone and Kirk then decided to go forward with
three Makololo and settle the question for themselves. It was as
tough a bit of travel as they ever had in Africa, and after some
painful marching the Badema guides refused to go further; "the
Banyai," they said, "would be angry if they showed white men the
country; and there was besides no practicable approach to the spot,
neither elephant, nor hippopotamus, nor even a crocodile could reach
the cataract." The slopes of the mountains on each side of the
river, now not 300 yards wide, and without the flattish flood-channel
and groove, were more than 3000 feet from the sky-line down, and were
covered either with dense thornbush or huge black boulders; this deep
trough-like shape caused the sun's rays to converge as into a focus,
making the surface so hot that the soles of the feet of the Makololo
became blistered. Around, and up and down, the party clambered among
these heated blocks, at a pace not exceeding a mile an hour; the
strain upon the muscles in jumping from crag to boulder, and
wriggling round projections, took an enormous deal out of them, and
they were often glad to cower in the shadow formed by one rock
overhanging and resting on another; the shelter induced the
peculiarly strong and overpowering inclination to sleep, which too
much sun sometimes causes. This sleep is curative of what may be
incipient sunstroke: in its first gentle touches, it caused the
dream to flit over the boiling brain, that they had become lunatics
and had been sworn in as members of the Alpine club; and then it
became so heavy that it made them feel as if a portion of existence
had been cut out from their lives. The sun is excessively hot, and
feels sharp in Africa; but, probably from the greater dryness of the
atmosphere, we never heard of a single case of sunstroke, so common
in India. The Makololo told Dr. Livingstone they "always thought he
had a heart, but now they believed he had none," and tried to
persuade Dr. Kirk to return, on the ground that it must be evident
that, in attempting to go where no living foot could tread, his
leader had given unmistakeable signs of having gone mad. All their
efforts of persuasion, however, were lost upon Dr. Kirk, as he had
not yet learned their language, and his leader, knowing his companion
to be equally anxious with himself to solve the problem of the
navigableness of Kebrabasa, was not at pains to enlighten him.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 14 of 134
Words from 13328 to 14347
of 136856
