Our march presented curious contrasts of this strange African nature, which is ever in extremes. At one time a splendid view would charm me; above, a sky of purest azure, flecked with fleecy clouds. The plain was as a park in autumn, burnt tawny by the sun. A party was at work merrily, as if preparing for an English harvest home. Calabashes and clumps of evergreen trees were scattered over the scene, each stretching its lordly arms aloft. The dove, the peewit, and the guinea-fowl fluttered about. The most graceful of animals, the zebra and the antelope, browsed in the distance. Then suddenly the fair scene would vanish as if by enchantment. We suddenly turned into a tangled mass of tall, fœtid reeds, rank jungle, and forest. After the fiery sun and dry atmosphere of the plains, the sudden effect of the damp and clammy chill was overpowering. In such places one feels as if poisoned by miasma; a shudder runs through
the frame, and cold perspiration breaks over the brow.
So things went on until September 4th, which still found us on the march. We had reached the basin of Inenge, which lies at the foot of the Windy Pass, the third and westernmost range of the Usagara Mountains. The climate is ever in extremes; during the day a furnace, and at night a refrigerator. Here we halted. The villagers of the settlements overlooking the ravine flocked down to barter their animals and grain.
The halt was celebrated by abundant drumming and droning, which lasted half the night; it served to raise the spirits of the men, who had talked of nothing the whole day but the danger of being attacked by the Wahumba, a savage tribe. The next morning there arrived a caravan of about four hundred porters, marching to the coast under the command of some Arab merchants. We interchanged civilities, and I was allured into buying a few yards of rope and other things, and also some asses. One of my men had also increased his suite, unknown to me at first, by the addition of Zawada—the “Nice Gift.” She was a woman of about thirty, with black skin shining like a patent leather boot, a bulging brow, little red eyes, a wide mouth, which displayed a few long, scattered teeth, and a figure considerably too bulky for her thin legs. She was a patient and hardworking woman, and respectable enough in the acceptation of the term. She was
at once married off to old Musangesi, one of the donkey-men, whose nose and chin made him a caricature of our old friend Punch. After detecting her in a lengthy walk, perhaps not a solitary one, he was guilty of such cruelty to her that I felt compelled to decree a dissolution of the marriage, and she returned safely to Zanzibar. At Inenge another female slave was added to our troop in the person of Sikujui—“Don’t Know”—a herculean person with a virago manner. The channel of her upper lip had been pierced to admit a bone, which gave her the appearance of having a duck’s bill. “Don’t Know’s” morals were frightful. She was duly espoused, in the forlorn hope of making her a respectable woman, to Goha, the sturdiest of the Wak’hutu porters; after a week she treated him with sublime contempt. She gave him first one and then a dozen rivals, and she disordered the whole caravan with her irregularities, in addition to breaking every article entrusted to her charge, and at last deserted shamelessly, so that her husband finally disposed of her to a travelling trader in exchange for a few measures of rice. Her ultimate fate I do not know, but the trader came next morning to complain of a broken head.
After Inenge we were in for a bad part of the journey, and great labour. Trembling with ague, with swimming heads, ears deafened by weakness, and limbs that would hardly support us, we contemplated with horrid despair the apparently perpendicular path
up which we and our starving asses were about to toil.
On September 10th we hardened our hearts and began to breast the Pass Terrible. After rounding in two places wall-like sheets of rock and crossing a bushy slope, we faced a long steep of loose white soil and rolling stones, up which we could see the porters swarming more like baboons than human beings, and the asses falling every few yards. As we moved slowly and painfully forward, compelled to lie down by cough, thirst, and fatigue, the sayhah, or war-cry, rang loud from hill to hill, and Indian files of archers and spearmen streamed like lines of black ants in all directions down the paths. The predatory Wahumba, awaiting the caravan’s departure, had seized the opportunity of driving the cattle and plundering the village of Inenge.
By resting every few yards, we reached, after about six hours, the summit of the Pass Terrible, and here we sat down amongst aromatic flowers and pretty shrubs to recover strength and breath.
On September 14th, our health much improved by the weather, we left the hilltop and began to descend the counterslope of the Usagara Mountains. For the first time since many days I had strength enough to muster the porters and inspect their loads. The outfit which had been expected to last a year had been half exhausted within three months. I summoned Said bin Salim, and told him my anxiety. Like a veritable Arab, he declared we had enough to last until