The boiling-point of water showed a descent, from the edge of the plateau to our furthest point west, of 170 feet; but this can only be considered as an approximation, and no dependence could have been placed on it, had we not had the courses of the streams to confirm this rather rough mode of ascertaining altitudes. The slope, as shown by the watershed, was to the “Loangwa of the Maravi,” and towards the Moitala, or south-west, west, and north-west. After we leave the feeders of Lake Nyassa, the water drains towards the centre of the continent. The course of the Kasai, a river seen during Dr. Livingstone’s journey to the West Coast, and its feeders was to the north-east, or somewhat in the same direction. Whether the water thus drained off finds its way out by the Congo, or by the Nile, has not yet been ascertained. Some parts of the continent have been said to resemble an inverted dinner-plate. This portion seems more of the shape, if shape it has, of a wide-awake hat, with the crown a little depressed. The altitude of the brim in some parts is considerable; in others, as at Tette and the bottom of Murchison’s Cataracts, it is so small that it could be ascertained only by eliminating the daily variations of the barometer, by simultaneous observations on the Coast, and at points some two or three hundred miles inland. So long as African rivers remain in what we may call the brim, they present no obstructions; but no sooner do they emerge from the higher lands than their utility is impaired by cataracts. The low lying belt is very irregular. At times sloping up in the manner of the rim of an inverted dinner-plate—while in other cases, a high ridge rises near the sea, to be succeeded by a lower district inland before we reach the central plateau. The breadth of the low lands is sometimes as much as three hundred miles, and that breadth determines the limits of navigation from the seaward.
We made three long marches beyond Muazi’s in a north-westerly direction; the people were civil enough, but refused to sell us any food. We were travelling too fast, they said; in fact, they were startled, and before they recovered their surprise, we were obliged to depart. We suspected that Muazi had sent them orders to refuse us food, that we might thus be prevented from going into the depopulated district; but this may have been mere suspicion, the result of our own uncharitable feelings.
We spent one night at Machambwé’s village, and another at Chimbuzi’s. It is seldom that we can find the headman on first entering a village. He gets out of the way till he has heard all about the strangers, or he is actually out in the fields looking after his farms. We once thought that when the headman came in from a visit of inspection, with his spear, bow and arrows, they had been all taken up for the occasion, and that he had all the while been hidden in some hut slily watching till he heard that the strangers might be trusted; but on listening to the details given by these men of the appearances of the crops at different parts, and the astonishing minuteness of the speakers’ topography, we were persuaded that in some cases we were wrong, and felt rather humiliated. Every knoll, hill, mountain, and every peak on a range has a name; and so has every watercourse, dell, and plain. In fact, every feature and portion of the country is so minutely distinguished by appropriate names, that it would take a lifetime to decipher their meaning. It is not the want, but the superabundance of names that misleads travellers, and the terms used are so multifarious that good scholars will at times scarcely know more than the subject of conversation. Though it is a little apart from the topic of the attention which the headmen pay to agriculture, yet it may be here mentioned, while speaking of the fulness of the language, that we have heard about a score of words to indicate different varieties of gait—one walks leaning forward, or backward, swaying from side to side, loungingly, or smartly, swaggeringly, swinging the arms, or only one arm, head down or up, or otherwise; each of these modes of walking was expressed by a particular verb; and more words were used to designate the different varieties of fools than we ever tried to count.
Mr. Moffat has translated the whole Bible into the language of the Bechuana, and has diligently studied this tongue for the last forty-four-years; and, though knowing far more of the language than any of the natives who have been reared on the Mission-station of Kuruman, he does not pretend to have mastered it fully even yet. However copious it may be in terms of which we do not feel the necessity, it is poor in others, as in abstract terms, and words used to describe mental operations.
Our third day’s march ended in the afternoon of the 27th September, 1863, at the village of Chinanga on the banks of a branch of the Loangwa. A large, rounded mass of granite, a thousand feet high, called Ñombé rumé, stand on the plain a few miles off. It is quite remarkable, because it has so little vegetation on it. Several other granitic hills stand near it, ornamented with trees, like most heights of this country, and a heap of blue mountains appears away in the north.
The effect of the piercing winds upon the men had never been got rid of. Several had been unable to carry a load ever since we ascended to the highlands; we had lost one, and another poor lad was so ill as to cause us great anxiety. By waiting in this village, which was so old that it was full of vermin, all became worse. Our European food was entirely expended, and native meal, though finely ground, has so many sharp angular particles in it, that it brought back dysentery, from which we had suffered so much in May. We could scarcely obtain food for the men. The headman of this village of Chinanga was off in a foray against some people further north to supply slaves to the traders expected along the slave route we had just left; and was said, after having expelled the inhabitants, to be living in their stockade, and devouring their corn. The conquered tribe had purchased what was called a peace by presenting the conqueror with three women.
This state of matters afforded us but a poor prospect of finding more provisions in that direction than we could with great difficulty and at enormous prices obtain here. But neither want of food, dysentery, nor slave wars would have prevented our working our way round the Lake in some other direction, had we had time; but we had received orders from the Foreign Office to take the “Pioneer” down to the sea in the previous April. The salaries of all the men in her were positively “in any case to cease by the 31st of December.”
We were said to be only ten days’ distant from Lake Bemba. We might speculate on a late rise of the river. A month or six weeks would secure a geographical feat, but the rains were near. We had been warned by different people that the rains were close at hand, and that we should then be bogged and unable to travel. The flood in the river might be an early one, or so small in volume as to give but one chance of the “Pioneer” descending to the ocean. The Makololo too were becoming dispirited by sickness and want of food, and were naturally anxious to be back to their fields in time for sowing. But in addition to all this and more, it was felt that it would not be dealing honestly with the Government, were we, for the sake of a little éclat, to risk the detention of the “Pioneer” up the river during another year; so we decided to return; and though we had afterwards the mortification to find that we were detained two full months at the ship waiting for the flood which we expected immediately after our arrival there, the chagrin was lessened by a consciousness of having acted in a fair, honest, above-board manner throughout.
On the night of the 29th of September a thief came to the sleeping-place of our men and stole a leg of a goat. On complaining to the deputy headman, he said that the thief had fled, but would be caught. He suggested a fine, and offered a fowl and her eggs; but wishing that the thief alone should be punished, it was advised that he should be found and fined. The Makololo thought it best to take the fowl as a means of making the punishment certain. After settling this matter on the last day of September, we commenced our return journey. We had just the same time to go back to the ship, that we had spent in coming to this point, and there is not much to interest one in marching over the same ground a second time.
While on our journey north-west, a cheery old woman, who had once been beautiful, but whose white hair now contrasted strongly with her dark complexion, was working briskly in her garden as we passed. She seemed to enjoy a hale, hearty old age. She saluted us with what elsewhere would be called a good address; and, evidently conscious that she deserved the epithet, “dark but comely,” answered each of us with a frank “Yes, my child.” Another motherly-looking woman, sitting by a well, began the conversation by “You are going to visit Muazi, and you have come from afar, have you not?” But in general women never speak to strangers unless spoken to, so anything said by them attracts attention. Muazi once presented us with a basket of corn. On hinting that we had no wife to grind our corn, his buxom spouse struck in with roguish glee, and said, “I will grind it for you; and leave Muazi, to accompany and cook for you in the land of the setting sun.” As a rule the women are modest and retiring in their demeanour, and, without being oppressed with toil, show a great deal of industry. The crops need about eight months’ attention. Then when the harvest is home, much labour is required to convert it into food as porridge, or beer. The corn is pounded in a large wooden mortar, like the ancient Egyptian one, with a pestle six feet long and about four inches thick. The pounding is performed by two or even three women at one mortar. Each, before delivering a blow with her pestle, gives an upward jerk of the body, so as to put strength into the stroke, and they keep exact time, so that two pestles are never in the mortar at the same moment. The measured thud, thud, thud, and the women standing at their vigorous work, are associations inseparable from a prosperous African village. By the operation of pounding, with the aid of a little water, the hard outside scale or husk of the grain is removed, and the corn is made fit for the millstone. The meal irritates the stomach unless cleared from the husk; without considerable energy in the operator, the husk sticks fast to the corn. Solomon thought that still more vigour than is required to separate the hard husk or bran from wheat would fail to separate “a fool from his folly.” “Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.” The rainbow, in some parts, is called the “pestle of the Barimo,” or gods. Boys and girls, by constant practice with the pestle, are able to plant stakes in the ground by a somewhat similar action, in erecting a hut, so deftly that they never miss the first hole made.