One Part Of Pamozima
Is Perpendicular, And, When The River Is In Flood, Causes A Cloud Of
Vapour To Ascend, Which, In Our Journey To Lake Shirwa, We Saw At A
Distance Of At Least Eight Miles.
The entire descent from the Upper
to the Lower Shire is 1200 feet.
Only on one spot in all that
distance is the current moderate - namely, above Tedzane. The rest is
all rapid, and much of it being only fifty or eighty yards wide, and
rushing like a mill-race, it gives the impression of water-power,
sufficient to drive all the mills in Manchester, running to waste.
Pamofunda, or Pamozima, has a deep shady grove on its right bank.
When we were walking alone through its dark shade, we were startled
by a shocking smell like that of a dissecting-room; and on looking up
saw dead bodies in mats suspended from the branches of the trees, a
mode of burial somewhat similar to that which we subsequently saw
practised by the Parsees in their "towers of silence" at Poonah, near
Bombay. The name Pamozima means, "the departed spirits or gods" - a
fit name for a place over which, according to the popular belief, the
disembodied souls continually hover.
The rock lowest down in the series is dark reddish-grey syenite.
This seems to have been an upheaving agent, for the mica schists
above it are much disturbed. Dark trappean rocks full of hornblende
have in many places burst through these schists, and appear in
nodules on the surface.
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