CHAP. VII.
THE GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY OF THE SECOND REGION.
The second or mountain region extends from the western frontier of K’hutu, at the head of the alluvial valley, in E. long. 37° 28′, to the province of Ugogi, the eastern portion of the flat table-land of Ugogo, in E. long. 36° 14′. Its diagonal breadth is 85 geographical and rectilinear miles; and native caravans, if lightly laden, generally traverse it in three weeks, including three or four halts. Its length cannot be estimated. According to the guides, Usagara is a prolongation of the mountains of Nguru, or Ngu, extending southwards, with a gap forming the fluviatile valley of the Rwaha or Rufiji River, to the line of highlands of which Njesa in Uhiao is supposed to be the culminating apex: thus the feature would correspond with the Eastern Ghauts of the Indian Peninsula. The general law of the range is north and south; in the region now under consideration, the trend is from north by west to south by east, forming an angle of 10° 12′ with the meridian. The Usagara chain is of the first order in East Africa; it is indeed the only important elevation in a direct line from the coast to western Unyamwezi; it would hold, however, but a low grade in the general system of the earth’s mountains. The highest point above sea-level, observed by B. P. Therm., was 5,700 feet; there are, however, peaks which may rise to 6,000 and even to 7,000 feet, thus rivalling the inhabited portion of the Neilgherries. As has appeared, the chain, where crossed, was divided into three parallel ridges by longitudinal plains.
Owing to the lowness of the basal regions at the seaward slope, there is no general prospect of the mountains from the East, where, after bounding the plains of K’hutu on the north, by irregular bulging lines of rolling hill, the first gradient of insignificant height springs suddenly from the plain. Viewed from the west, the counterslope appears a long crescent, with the gibbus to the front, and the cusps vanishing into distance; the summit is in the centre of the half-moon, whose profile is somewhat mural and regular. The flanks are rounded lumpy cones, and their shape denotes an igneous and primary origin, intersected by plains and basins, the fractures of the rocky system. Internally the lay, as in granitic formations generally, is irregular; the ridges, preserving no general direction, appear to cross one another confusedly. The slope and the counterslope are not equally inclined. Here, as usual in chains fringing a peninsula, the seaward declivities are the more abrupt; the landward faces are not only more elongated, but they are also shortened in proportion as the plateau into which they fall is higher than the mountain-plains from which they rise. To enter, therefore, is more toilsome than to return.
From the mingling of lively colours, Usagara is delightful to the eye, after the monotonous tracts of verdure which pall upon the sight at Zanzibar and in the river valleys. The subsoil, displayed in the deeper cuts and ravines, is either of granite, greenstone, schiste, or a coarse incipient sandstone, brown or green, and outcropping from the ground with strata steeply tilted up. In the higher elevations, the soil varies in depth from a few inches to thirty feet; it is often streaked with long layers of pebbles, apparently water-rolled. The colour is either an ochreish brick-red, sometimes micaceous, and often tinted with oxide of iron; or it is a dull grey, the debris of comminuted felspar, which, like a mixture of all the colours, appears dazzlingly white under the sun’s rays. The plains and depressions are of black earth, which after a few showers becomes a grass-grown sheet of mire, and in the dry season a deeply-cracked, stubbly savannah. Where the elevations are veiled from base to summit with a thin forest, the crops of the greenstone and sandstone strata appear through a brown coat of fertile humus, the decay of vegetable matter. A fossil Bulimus was found about 3,000 feet above sea-level, and large Achatinæ, locally called Khowa, are scattered over the surface. On the hill-sides, especially in the lower slopes, are strewed and scattered erratic blocks and boulders, and diminutive pieces of white, dingy-red, rusty-pink, and yellow quartz, with large irregularly-shaped fragments and small nodules of calcareous kunkur. Where water lies deep below the surface, the hills and hill-plains are clothed with a thin shrubbery of mimosas and other thorny gums. Throughout Eastern Africa these forests are the only spots in which travelling is enjoyable: great indeed is their contrast with the normal features—bald glaring fields, fetid bush and grass, and monotonous expanses of dull dead herbage, concealing swamps and water-courses, hedged in by vegetation whose only varieties are green, greener, and greenest. In these favoured places the traveller appears surrounded by a thick wood which he never reaches, the trees thinning out as he advances. On clear and sunny days the scenery is strange and imposing. The dark-red earth is prolonged half-way up the tree-trunks by the ascending and descending galleries of the termite: contrasting with this peculiarly African tint, the foliage, mostly confined to the upper branches, is of a tender and lively green, whose open fret-work admits from above the vivid blue or the golden yellow of an unclouded sky. In the basins where water is nearer the surface, and upon the banks of water-courses and rivulets, the sweet and fertile earth produces a rich vegetation, and a gigantic growth of timber, which distinguishes this region from others further west. Usagara is peculiarly the land of jungle-flowers, and fruits, whose characteristic is a pleasant acidity, a provision of nature in climates where antiseptics and correctives to bile are almost necessaries of life. They are abundant, but, being uncultivated, the fleshy parts are undeveloped. In the plains, the air, heavy with the delicious perfume of the jasmine (Jasminum Abyssinicum?), with the strong odour of a kind of sage (Salvia Africana, or Abyssinica?), and with the fragrant exhalations of the mimosa-flowers, which hang like golden balls from the green clad boughs, forms a most enjoyable contrast to the fetid exhalations of the Great Dismal Swamps of the lowlands. The tamarind, everywhere growing wild, is a gigantic tree. The Myombo, the Mfu’u, the Ndábi, and the Mayágeá, a spreading tree with a large fleshy red flower, and gourds about eighteen inches long and hanging by slender cords, are of unusual dimensions; the calabash is converted into a hut; and the sycomore, whose favourite habitat is the lower counterslope of Usagara, is capable of shading a regiment. On the steep hill-sides, which here and there display signs of cultivation and clearings of green or sunburnt grass, grow parachute-shaped mimosas, with tall and slender trunks, and crowned by domes of verdure, rising in tiers one above the other, like umbrellas in a crowd.
The plains, basins, and steps, or facets of table-land found at every elevation, are fertilised by a stripe-work of streams, runnels, and burns, which anastomosing in a single channel, flow off into the main drain of the country. Cultivation is found in patches isolated by thick belts of thorny jungle, and the villages are few and rarely visited. As usual in hilly countries, they are built upon high ridges and the slopes of cones, for rapid drainage after rain, a purer air and fewer mosquitoes, and, perhaps, protection from kidnappers. The country people bring down their supplies of grain and pulse for caravans. There is some delay and difficulty on the first day of arrival at a station, and provisions for a party exceeding a hundred men are not to be depended upon after the third or fourth marketing, when the people have exhausted their stores. Fearing the thievish disposition of the Wasagara, who will attempt even to snatch away a cloth from a sleeping man, travellers rarely lodge near the settlements. Kraals of thorn, capacious circles enclosing straw boothies, are found at every march, and, when burned or destroyed by accident, they are rebuilt before the bivouac. The roads, as usual in East Africa, are tracks trodden down by caravans and cattle, and the water-course is ever the favourite Pass. Many of the ascents and descents are so proclivitous that donkeys must be relieved of their loads; and in fording the sluggish streams, where no grass forms a causeway over the soft, viscid mire, the animals sink almost to the knees. The steepest paths are those in the upper regions; in the lower, though the inclines are often severe, they are generally longer, and consequently easier. At the foot of each hill there is either a mud or a water-course dividing it from its neighbour. These obstacles greatly reduce the direct distance of the day’s march.
The mountains are well supplied with water, which tastes sweet after the brackish produce of the maritime valley, and good when not rendered soft and slimy by lying long on rushy beds. Upon the middle inclines the burns and runnels of the upper heights form terraces of considerable extent, and of a picturesque aspect. The wide and open sole, filled with the whitest and cleanest sand, and retaining pools of fresh clear water, or shallow wells, is edged by low steep ledges of a dull red clay, lined with glorious patriarchs of the forest, and often in the bed is a thickly wooded branch or shoal-islet, at whose upper extremity heavy driftwood, arrested by the gnarled mimosa-clumps, and the wall of shrubs, attests the violence of the rufous-tinted bore of waves with which a few showers fill the broadest courses. Lower down the channels which convey to the plains the surplus drainage of the mountains are heaps and sheets of granite, with long reaches of rough gravel; their stony walls, overrun with vegetation, tower high on either hand, and the excess of inclination produces after heavy rains torrents like avalanches, which cut their way deep into the lower plains. During the dry season, water is drawn from pits sunk from a few inches to 20 feet in the re-entering angles of the beds. Fed by the percolations of the soil, they unite the purity of springs with the abundance of rain-supplies,—a comfort fully appreciated by down-caravans after the frequent tirikeza, or droughty afternoon-marches in the western regions.
The versant of the mountains varies. In the seaward and the central sections streams flow eastward, and swell the Kingani and other rivers. The southern hills discharge their waters south and south-west through the Maroro River, and various smaller tributaries, into the “Rwaha,” which is the proper name for the upper course of the Rufiji. In the lateral plains between the ridges, and in the hill-girt basins, stagnant pools, which even during the Masika, or rainy season, inundate, but will not flow, repose upon beds of porous black earth, and engendering, by their profuse herbage of reeds and rush-like grass, with the luxuriant crops produced by artificial irrigation, a malarious atmosphere, cause a degradation in the people.
The climate of Usagara is cold and damp. It has two distinct varieties, the upper regions being salubrious, as the lower are unwholesome. In the sub-ranges heavy exhalations are emitted by the decayed vegetation, the nights are raw, the mornings chilly and misty, and the days are bright and hot. In the higher levels, near the sources of the Mukondokwa River, the climate suggests the idea of the Mahabaleshwar and the Neilgherry Hills in Western India. Compared with Uzaramo or Unyamwezi, these mountains are a sanatorium, and should Europeans ever settle in Eastern Africa as merchants or missionaries, here they might reside until acclimatised for the interior. The east wind, a local deflection of the south-east trade, laden with the moisture of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, and collecting the evaporation of the valley, impinges upon the seaward slope, where, ascending, and relieved from atmospheric pressure, it is condensed by a colder temperature; hence the frequent precipitations of heavy rain, and the banks and sheets of morning-cloud which veil the tree-clad peaks of the highest gradients. As the sun waxes hot, the atmosphere acquires a greater capacity for carrying water; and the results are a milky mist in the basins, and in the upper hills a wonderful clearness broken only by the thin cirri of the higher atmosphere. After sunset, again, the gradual cooling of the air causes the deposit of a copious dew, which renders the nights peculiarly pleasant to a European. The diurnal sea-breeze, felt in the slope, is unknown in the counterslope of the mountains, where, indeed, the climate is much inferior to that of the central and eastern heights. As in the Sawalik Hills, and the sub-ranges of the Himalayas, the sun is burning hot during the dry season, and in the rains there is either a storm of thunder and lightning, wind and rain, or a stillness deep and depressing, with occasional gusts whose distinct moaning shows the highly electrical state of the atmosphere. The Masika, here commencing in early January, lasts three months, when the normal easterly winds shift to the north and the north-west. The Vuli, confined to the eastern slopes, occurs in August, and, as on the plains, frequent showers fall between the vernal and the autumnal rains.
The people of Usagara suffer in the lower regions from severe ulcerations, from cutaneous disorders, and from other ailments of the plain. Higher up they are healthier, though by no means free from pleurisy, pneumonia, and dysentery. Fever is common; it is more acute in the range of swamps and decomposed herbage, and is milder in the well-ventilated cols and on the hill-sides. The type is rather a violent bilious attack, accompanied by remittent febrile symptoms, than a regular fever. It begins with cold and hot fits, followed by a copious perspiration, and sometimes inducing delirium; it lasts as a quotidian or a tertian from four to seven days; and though the attacks are slight, they are followed by great debility, want of appetite, of sleep, and of energy. This fever is greatly exacerbated by exposure and fatigue, and it seldom fails to leave behind it a legacy of cerebral or visceral disease.
The mountains of Usagara are traversed from east to west by two main lines; the Mukondokwa on the northern and the Kiringawana on the southern line. The former was closed until 1856 by a chronic famine, the result of such a neighbourhood as the Wazegura and the people of Whinde on the east, the Wahumba and the Wamasai northwards, and the Warori on the south-west. In 1858 the mountaineers, after murdering by the vilest treachery a young Arab trader, Salim bin Nasir, of the Bu Saidi, or the royal family of Zanzibar, attempted to plunder a large mixed caravan of Wanyamwezi and Wasawahili, numbering 700 or 800 guns, commanded by a stout fellow, Abdullah bin Nasib, called by the Africans “Kisesa,” who carried off the cattle, burned the villages, and laid waste the whole of the Rubeho or western chain.