Having dealt with the main feature of the land, Kavalli proceeds to unbosom himself. He is in danger of his life from Kadongo, who is an ally of Kabba-Rega, and he has an enemy in Katonza. Some years ago Kavalli possessed a village near the Nyanza, where his fishermen lived. Kadongo envied him the fine possession, and with Katonza and some raiders of Unyoro set upon Kavalli, burned his village, slew many of his people, and despoiled him of all his cattle in one night. Kavalli fled to Melindwa, and after awhile he returned to live with the Bavira, and by scraping a bit here and there, and making good bargains, he can show about eighty head of cattle to-day. He has received warning, however, that Kadongo will attack him again.
No sooner has Kavalli ceased his graphic recital wrongs endured, than Katto and Kalengé—Mazamboni’s brother and cousin—begin to detail the wrongs inflicted on them by Musiri. A brother and a sister, several relatives, and many friends have been slaughtered by relentless Musiri. The stories are given circumstantially with expressive action, and heighten the atrocious conduct of Musiri.
Then Gavira begins to relate how the Balegga of Mutundu, and Musiri, have ill-treated him. According to him, what few herds escaped the rapacious Wara-Sura during their periodic raids have been often thinned by the nocturnal cattle-lifters of Mutundu and Musiri, who steal alternately from him. “Ah,” says Gavira, “to-day it is the Wara-Sura, to-morrow it is Musiri, the day after Mutundu; we are continually flying to the hills from somebody.”
Yet, gazing on the wonderfully pleasant scene of green grass-land before us, with not a cloud in the sky, and a drowsy restfulness everywhere, who could have supposed this Arcadia-like land was disturbed by contentions, enmities, and wars?
Most of the Wahuma now west of the Albert came from Unyoro, as they fled from the avaricious tyranny and avarice of its kings.
Old Ruguji, for instance, who is next neighbour to Kavalli, and whose forty head of cattle we rescued for him from Melindwa, was born in Unyoro, and remembers his great-grandfather, who must have been born about 1750 A.D. When he was ten years old (1829) Kuguji remembered Chowambi, father of Kamrasi, the father of Kabba Rega, sending to his great-grandfather for cattle. “At that time the Semliki River flowed into a large lagoon, called Katera, on the south-east side of the Lake. The Waganda were often prevented from crossing over to the Balegga countries because of those lagoons, but since the lagoons have been filled with mud, and the Semliki falls into the Lake, and as Kamrasi wanted cattle continually, and one day he took all, I took my women and children, when I was a young man, and came over here.”
“Have you had peace here, Ruguji?”
“See my scars; I have things to remind me of the Balegga and Melindwa, Musiri and the Wara-Sura. The Bavira also came from Kukaland, and they asked our permission while we were feeding our herds to come and live with us, but they have the big head also, and some day there will be trouble with them.”
The pasture-land lying between Lake Albert and the forest was subjected to much denudation by rain. Though the bosses of hills, ridges, dykes, bear an approximately uniform level, the intermediate ground varies greatly—it is highest of course as it approaches the Albert, and lowest towards the Ituri river, which drains nearly the whole of the area. It would be difficult, however, to find an absolutely level tract of any respectable extent, though a cursory view of it might decide otherwise. It is a complicated system of slope and counter-slope, supplying scores of tributary rivulets, brooks and stream, belonging to some main feeder of the Ituri.
The nature of the soil, being a loose sandy loam—loosened still more by hosts of burrowing beetles, which do the office of moles and earthworms—offers no resistance to the perpetual denuding of the surface by frequent furious and long-lasting rainstorms, despite its rich crops of grass. A visit to one of the streams after a rainstorm reveals how rapid is the process of destruction; and if we follow one of these smaller streams to the confluence with the main tributary, we shall see yet greater proofs of the havoc created in the face of the apparently smooth swells of land than would appear at first possible by a few hours’ heavy rain.