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.
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