At Jiwe la Mkoa the neck of the desert is broken: the western portion of Mgunda Mk’hali has already thinned out. On the 23rd October, despite the long march of the preceding day, Khalfan proposed a Tirikeza, declaring that the heavy nimbus from the west, accompanied by a pleasant cold, portended rain, and that this rain, like the “Choti Barsat” of India, announces the approach of the great Masika, or vernal wet season. Yielding to his reasons, we crossed the “Round Rock,” and passing through an open forest of tall trees, with here and there an undulating break, now yellow with quartz, then black with humus, we reached, after about three hours, another clearing like Jiwe la Mkoa, which owes its origin to the requirements of commerce. “Kirurumo” boasted of several newly built Tembe of Wakimbu, who supplied caravans at an exorbitant rate. The blackness of the ground, and the vivid green of vegetation, evidenced the proximity of water. The potable element was found in pits, sunk in a narrow nullah running northwards across the clearing; it was muddy and abundant. On the next day the road led through a thin forest of thorns and gums, which, bare of bush and underwood, afforded a broad path and pleasant, easy travelling. Sign of elephant and rhinoceros, giraffe and antelope, crossed the path, and as usual in such places, the asses were tormented by the Tzetze. After travelling four hours and thirty minutes, we reached a new settlement upon the western frontier of Uganzi, called “Jiweni,” “near the stones,” from the heaps of block and boulder scattered round pits of good water, sunk about three feet in the ground. The Mongo Nullah, a deep surface-drain, bisects this clearing, which is palpably modern. Many of the trees are barked previous to felling, and others have fallen prostrate, apparently from the depredations of the white ant. On the 25th, after another desert march of 2 hrs. 20′ through a flat country, where the forest was somewhat deformed by bush and brake, which in places narrowed the path to a mere goat-track, we arrived at the third quarter of Mgunda Mk’hali. “Mgongo T’hembo,” or the Elephant’s Back, derives its name from a long narrow ridge of chocolate-coloured syenite, outcropping from the low forest lands around it; the crest of the chain is composed of loose rocks and large detached boulders. Like the other inhabited portions of Mgunda Mk’hali, it is a recent clearing; numerous “black-jacks,” felled trees, and pollarded stumps still cumber the fields. The “Elephant’s Back” is, however, more extensive and better cultivated than any of its neighbours,—Mdáburu alone excepted,—and water being abundant and near the surface, it supports an increasing population of mixed Wakimbu and Wataturu, who dwell in large substantial Tembe, and live by selling their surplus holcus, maize, and fowls to travellers. They do not, like the Wakimbu of Jiwe la Mkoa, refuse entrance to their villages, but they receive the stranger with the usual niggard guest-rites of the slave-path, and African-like, they think only of what is to be gained by hospitality. Here I halted for a day to recruit and to lay in rations. The length of the stages had told upon the men; Bombay had stumped himself, several of the sons of Ramji, and two of Said bin Salim’s children were unable to walk; the asses, throwing themselves upon the ground, required to be raised with the stick, and all preferred rest even to food. Mboni, one of the sons of Ramji, carried off a slave girl from the camp of the Coast-Arabs; her proprietor came armed to recover her, swords were drawn, a prodigious clash and clatter of tongue arose, friends interfered, and blades were sheathed. Khalfan bin Khamis, losing all patience at this delay, bade us adieu, promising to announce our approach at Unyanyembe; about a week afterwards, however, we found him in most melancholy plight, halted half-way, because his over-worked porters had taken “French leave.”
We resumed our march on the 27th October, and after a slow and painful progress for seven hours over a rolling country, whose soil was now yellow with argile, then white with felspar, then black-brown with humus, through thorny bush, and forest here opening out, there densely closing in, we arrived at the “Tura Nullah,” the deepest of the many surface drains winding tortuously to the S. W. The trees lining the margin were of the noblest dimensions; the tall thick grass that hedged them in showed signs of extensive conflagration, and water was found in shallow pools and in deep pits beneath the banks, on the side to which the stream, which must be furious during the rainy season, swings. When halted in a clear place in the jungle, we were passed by a down caravan of Wanyamwezi; our porters shouted and rushed up to greet their friends, the men raised their right hands about a dozen times, and then clapped palm to palm, and the women indulged in “vigelegele,” the African “lulliloo,” which rang like breech-loaders in our ears.
On the next day we set out betimes through the forest, which, as usual when nearing populous settlements, spread out, and which began at this season to show a preponderance of green over brown. Presently we reached a large expanse of yellow stover where the van had halted, in order that the caravan might make its first appearance with dignity. Ensued a clearing, studded with large stockaded villages, peering over tall hedges of dark green milk-bush, fields of maize and millet, manioc, gourds, and water-melons, and showing numerous flocks and herds, clustering around the shallow pits. The people swarmed from their abodes, young and old hustling one another for a better stare; the man forsook his loom and the girl her hoe, and for the remainder of the march we were escorted by a tail of screaming boys and shouting adults; the males almost nude, the women, bare to the waist and clothed only knee-deep in kilts, accompanied us, puffing pipes the while, with wallets of withered or flabby flesh flapping the air, striking their hoes with stones, crying “Beads! beads!” and ejaculating their wonder in strident explosions of “Hi! hi!—Hui! ih!” and “Ha!—a!—a!” It was a spectacle to make an anchorite of a man,—it was at once ludicrous and disgusting.
At length the Kirangozi fluttered his red flag in the wind, and the drums, horns, and larynxes of his followers began the fearful uproar which introduces a caravan to the admiring “natives.” Leading the way, our guide, much to my surprise,—I knew not then that such was the immemorial custom of Unyamwezi,—entered uninvited and sans ceremony the nearest large village; the long string of porters flocked in with bag and baggage, and we followed their example. The guests at once dispersed themselves through the several courts and compounds into which the interior hollow was divided, and lodged themselves with as much regard for self and disregard for their grumbling hosts as possible. We were placed under a wall-less roof, bounded on one side by the bars of the village palisade, and the mob of starers that relieved one another from morning till night made me feel like the denizen of a menagerie.
Usagara Mountains, seen from Ugogo.
CHAP. IX.
THE GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOGRAPHY OF UGOGO,—THE THIRD REGION.
The third division of the country visited is a flat table-land extending from the Ugogi “Dhun,” or valley, at the western base of the Wasagara Mountains, in E. long. 36° 14′, to Tura, the eastern district of Unyamwezi, in E. long. 33° 57′; occupying a diagonal breadth of 155 geographical rectilinear miles. The length from north to south is not so easily estimated. The Wahumba and the Wataturu in the former, and the Wahehe and Warori in the latter direction, are migratory tribes that spurn a civilised frontier; according to the Arabs, however, the Wagogo extend three long marches on an average to the north and four or five southwards. This, assuming the march at 15 miles, would give a total of 120. The average of the heights observed is 3,650 feet, with a gradual rise westwards to Jiwe la Mkoa, which attains an altitude of 4,200 feet(?).
The third region, situated to leeward of a range whose height compels the south-east trades to part with their load of vapours, and distant from the succession of inland seas, which, stationed near the centre of the African continent, act as reservoirs to restore the balance of humidity, is an arid, sterile land, a counterpart, in many places, of the Kalahari and the Karroo, or South African desert-plains. The general aspect is a glaring yellow flat, darkened by long growths of acrid, saline, and succulent plants, thorny bush, and stunted trees, and the colouring is monotonous in the extreme. It is sprinkled with isolated dwarf cones bristling with rocks and boulders, from whose interstices springs a thin forest of gums, thorns, and mimosas. The power of igneous agency is displayed in protruding masses of granitic formation, which rise from the dead level with little foundationary elevation; and the masses of sandstone, superincumbent upon the primitive base in other parts of the country, here disappear. On the north rises the long tabular range of the Wahumba Hills, separated by a line of lower ground from the plateau. Southwards, a plain, imperceptibly shelving, trends towards the Rwaha River. There are no rivers in Ugogo: the periodical rains are carried off by large nullahs, whose clay banks are split and cut during the season of potent heat into polygonal figures like piles of columnar basalt. On the sparkling nitrous salinas and the dull-yellow or dun-coloured plains the mirage faintly resembles the effects of refraction in desert Arabia. The roads are mere foot-tracks worn through the fields and bushes. The kraals are small dirty circles enclosing a calabash or other tree, against which goods are stacked. The boothies are made of dried canes and stubble, surrounded by a most efficient chevaux de frise of thorn-boughs. At the end of the dry season they are burnt down by inevitable accident. The want of wood prevents their being made solidly, and for the same reason “bois de vache” is the usual fuel of the country.
The formation of the subsoil is mostly sandstone bearing a ruddy sand. The surface is in rare places a brown vegetable humus, extending but a few inches in depth, or more generally a hard yellow-reddish ferruginous clay covered with quartz nodules of many colours, and lumps of carbonate of lime, or white and siliceous sand, rather resembling a well-metalled road or an “untidy expanse of gravel-walk” than the rich moulds which belong to the fertile African belt. In many parts are conical anthills of pale red earth; in others ironstone crops out of the plain; and everywhere fine and coarse grits abound. The land is in parts condemned to perpetual drought, and nowhere is water either good or plentiful. It is found in the serpentine beds of nullahs, and after rain in ziwa, vleys, tanks, pools, or ponds, filled by a gentle gravitation, and retained by a strong clay, in deep pits excavated by the people, or in shallow holes “crowed” in the ground. The supplies of this necessary divide the country into three great districts. On the east is Marenga Mk’hali, a thick bush, where a few villages, avoided by travellers, are scattered north and south of the road. The heart of the region is Ugogo, the most populous and the best cultivated country, divided into a number of small and carefully cultivated clearings by tracts of dense bush and timberless woods, a wall of verdure during the rains, and in the hot season a system of thorns and broomwork which serves merely to impede a free circulation of the air. These seams of waste land appear strange in a country populated of old; the Arabs, however, declare that the land is more thinly inhabited than it used to be. Mgunda Mk’hali, the western division, is a thin forest and a heap of brakey jungle. The few hills are thickly clothed with vegetation, probably because they retain more moisture than the plains.