At
One Part A Bare Mountain Spur Barred The Way, And Had To Be
Surmounted By A Perilous And Circuitous
Route, along which the crags
were so hot that it was scarcely possible for the hand to hold on
long
Enough to ensure safety in the passage; and had the foremost of
the party lost his hold, he would have hurled all behind him into the
river at the foot of the promontory; yet in this wild hot region, as
they descended again to the river, they met a fisherman casting his
hand-net into the boiling eddies, and he pointed out the cataract of
Morumbwa; within an hour they were trying to measure it from an
overhanging rock, at a height of about one hundred feet. When you
stand facing the cataract, on the north bank, you see that it is
situated in a sudden bend of the river, which is flowing in a short
curve; the river above it is jammed between two mountains in a
channel with perpendicular sides, and less than fifty yards wide; one
or two masses of rock jut out, and then there is a sloping fall of
perhaps twenty feet in a distance of thirty yards. It would stop all
navigation, except during the highest floods; the rocks showed that
the water then rises upwards of eighty feet perpendicularly.
Still keeping the position facing the cataract, on its right side
rises Mount Morumbwa from 2000 to 3000 feet high, which gives the
name to the spot. On the left of the cataract stands a noticeable
mountain which may be called onion-shaped, for it is partly conical
and a large concave flake has peeled off, as granite often does, and
left a broad, smooth convex face as if it were an enormous bulb.
These two mountains extend their bases northwards about half a mile,
and the river in that distance, still very narrow, is smooth, with a
few detached rocks standing out from its bed. They climbed as high
up the base of Mount Morumbwa, which touches the cataract, as they
required. The rocks were all water-worn and smooth, with huge
potholes, even at 100 feet above low water. When at a later period
they climbed up the north-western base of this same mountain, the
familiar face of the onion-shaped one opposite was at once
recognised; one point of view on the talus of Mount Morumbwa was not
more than 700 or 800 yards distant from the other, and they then
completed the survey of Kebrabasa from end to end.
They did not attempt to return by the way they came, but scaled the
slope of the mountain on the north. It took them three hours' hard
labour in cutting their way up through the dense thornbush which
covered the ascent. The face of the slope was often about an angle
of 70 degrees, yet their guide Shokumbenla, whose hard, horny soles,
resembling those of elephants, showed that he was accustomed to this
rough and hot work, carried a pot of water for them nearly all the
way up. They slept that night at a well in a tufaceous rock on the
N.W. of Chipereziwa, and never was sleep more sweet.
A band of native musicians came to our camp one evening, on our own
way down, and treated us with their wild and not unpleasant music on
the Marimba, an instrument formed of bars of hard wood of varying
breadth and thickness, laid on different-sized hollow calabashes, and
tuned to give the notes; a few pieces of cloth pleased them, and they
passed on.
The rainy season of Tette differs a little from that of some of the
other intertropical regions; the quantity of rain-fall being
considerably less. It begins in November and ends in April. During
our first season in that place, only a little over nineteen inches of
rain fell. In an average year, and when the crops are good, the fall
amounts to about thirty-five inches. On many days it does not rain
at all, and rarely is it wet all day; some days have merely a passing
shower, preceded and followed by hot sunshine; occasionally an
interval of a week, or even a fortnight, passes without a drop of
rain, and then the crops suffer from the sun. These partial droughts
happen in December and January. The heat appears to increase to a
certain point in the different latitudes so as to necessitate a
change, by some law similar to that which regulates the intense cold
in other countries. After several days of progressive heat here, on
the hottest of which the thermometer probably reaches 103 degrees in
the shade, a break occurs in the weather, and a thunderstorm cools
the air for a time. At Kuruman, when the thermometer stood above 84
degrees, rain might be expected; at Kolobeng, the point at which we
looked for a storm was 96 degrees. The Zambesi is in flood twice in
the course of the year; the first flood, a partial one, attains its
greatest height about the end of December or beginning of January;
the second, and greatest, occurs after the river inundates the
interior, in a manner similar to the overflow of the Nile, this rise
not taking place at Tette until March. The Portuguese say that the
greatest height which the March floods attain is thirty feet at
Tette, and this happens only about every fourth year; their
observations, however, have never been very accurate on anything but
ivory, and they have in this case trusted to memory alone. The only
fluviometer at Tette, or anywhere else on the river, was set up at
our suggestion; and the first flood was at its greatest height of
thirteen feet six inches on the 17th January, 1859, and then
gradually fell a few feet, until succeeded by the greater flood of
March. The river rises suddenly, the water is highly discoloured and
impure, and there is a four-knot current in many places; but in a day
or two after the first rush of waters is passed, the current becomes
more equally spread over the whole bed of the river, and resumes its
usual rate in the channel, although continuing in flood.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 15 of 134
Words from 14348 to 15397
of 136856
