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.
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