The men chip their teeth to points, and, like the Wasumbara, punch out in childhood one incisor from the lower jaw; a piece of dried rush or sugar-cane distends the ear-lobe to an unsightly size. All carried bows and arrows. Some shouldered such hoes and hatchets as English children use upon the sands: here bounteous earth, fertilized by the rains of heaven, requires merely the scratching of a man’s staff. Others led stunted curs, much like the pariah dogs of Hindostan, adorned with leather collars: I afterwards saw similar pets at the Yellalah of the Congo river. The animals are prime favourites with the savages, as were the Spanish puppies in the days of Charles II.; they hold a dog-stew to be a dish fit for a king. In West Africa also the meat finds many admirers, and some missionaries in the Niger regions have described it as somewhat glutinous, but ‘very sweet.’ Why should we not have cynophages as well as hippophages?
The salutations of these savages provoked the comical wrath of Sidi Bombay; and indeed they were not a little ridiculous. Acquaintances stood afar off, as if in fear of each other, and nosed forth ‘Kua-heri,’ and protracted hans and huns, until they had relieved their minds. None, even the women, refused to greet us, and at times Yambo—the state?—was uttered simultaneously by a score of sable lips. Having duly stared and been stared at, we unloaded for rest about 9.30 A. M., under a spreading tree, near the large, double-fenced village of Pasunga, belonging to one of Sultan Kimwere’s multitudinous sons. Again clouds obscured the air, gathering thick upon the mountain-tops, whence came the mutterings of thunder from afar.
Presently the pleasant coolness drew from the Baloch cries of Safar! Safar!—let us march! At 1 P. M. we resumed our way, and presently we passed, on our left hand, a tank of mire and water, thinly sprinkled with paddy-birds, sand-pipers, and Egyptian geese—all exceedingly wild. Hornbills screamed from the neighbouring trees, and on the mud my companion shot a specimen of the gorgeous crested crane, whose back feathers have made bonnets fine. After an hour’s march we skirted a village where the people peremptorily commanded us to halt. We attributed this annoyance to Wazira, who was forthwith visited with a severe wigging. It is, however, partly the custom of the country: and even in the far less barbarous Angola, to pass a farm-house without entering it is to insult the proprietor. Man claims a right to hear from the wandering stranger news—a pabulum which his soul loves: to coin the most improbable nonsense; to be told lies with the bloom on them, and to retail them to his neighbours, are the mental distractions of the idler, equally the primum mobile of a Crimean ‘shave’ and of an African palaver. But the impending rain had sharpened our tempers. We laughed in the faces of our furious expostulators, and bidding them stop us if they could, we pursued our way.
Presently ascending a hill and making an abrupt turn from N. West nearly due East, we found ourselves opposite and about 10 miles distant from a tall azure hill-curtain, the highlands of Fuga. Below, the plain was everywhere populous with scatters of haycock villages. Lofty tamarinds, the large-leaved plantain, and the parasol-shaped papaw grew wild amongst the thorny trees. Water stood in black pools, and around it waved luxuriant sugar-cane: in a moment every mouth was tearing at and chewing the end of a long pole. The cane is of the edible species; the officinal varieties are too luscious, cloying, and bilious to be sucked with impunity by civilized man. After walking that day a total of 16 miles, about 4 P. M. we were driven by a violent storm of thunder, lightning, and raw S. West wind, which at once lowered the mercury several degrees, and caused the slaves to shudder and whimper, into the Banda-ni or Palaver-house of a large village. Our shelter consisted of a thatched roof propped by rough uprights and wanting walls: the floor was half mud, half mould, and the furniture was represented by stone slabs used as hones, and by hollowed logs once bee-hives and now seats. The only tenants were flies and mosquitos. We lighted fires to keep off fevers: this precaution should never be neglected by the African traveller, even during the closest evenings of the tropical hot season. Our Baloch, after the usual wrangle about rations, waxed melancholy, shook their heads, and declared that the Kausi, the S. West trade-wind that brings the wet monsoon, was fast approaching, if, indeed, it had not regularly set in.
Sunday, February 15, dawned with one of those steady little cataclysms, which to be seen advantageously must be seen near the Line. At 11 A.M., thoroughly tired of the steaming Banda-ni, our men loaded, and we set out in a lucid interval towards the highlands. As we approached them the rain shrank to a mere spitting, gradually ceased, and was replaced by that reeking, fetid, sepulchral heat, which travellers in the tropics have learned to fear. The path lay over the normal red clay, crossed low ground where trees decayed in stagnant water, and spanned the cultivated plain of dark mould at the foot of the mountains, with a vista of far blue hill on the right. We rested a few minutes before attempting the steep incline before us: the slippery, muddy way had wearied our slaves, though aided by three porters hired that morning, and the sun, struggling with vapours, was still hot enough to overpower the whole party.
At 1 P. M. we proceeded to breast the pass leading from the lowland alluvial plain to the threshold of the Æthiopic Olympus. The gently-rising path, spread with decayed foliage, wound amongst groves of large, coarse bananas, whose arms of satiny sheen here smoothed and streaked, there shredded by the hill-winds, hid purple flowers and huge bunches of green fruit. The Musa, which an old traveller describes as an assemblage of leaves interwoven and twisted together so neatly, that they form a plant about 15 spans high, is an aboriginal of Hindostan, and possibly of East Africa, where, however, the seeds might easily have been floated from the East: it grows almost spontaneously in Unyamwezi and upon the shores of the great inland lakes. Here the banana,[[38]] which maturing rapidly affords a perennial supply of fruit, and whose enormous rate of produce has been described by many writers, is the staff of savage life, windy as the acorn which is supposed to have fed our forefathers in Europe. As usual where men are compelled by their wants to utilize a single tree, the cocoa, for instance, or the calabash, these East Africans apply the plantain to a vast variety of uses, and allow no part of it to be wasted. The stem when green gives water enough to quench the wanderer’s thirst and to wash his hands; the parenchyma has somewhat the taste of cucumber, and sun-dried it is employed for fuel. The fresh cool leaves are converted into rain-pipes, spoons, plates, and even bottles: desiccated they make thatch, and a substitute for wrapping-papers; and some have believed that they were the original fig-leaves of the first man and his wife. The trunk-fibre does good service in all the stages between thread and cord: the fruit yields wine, sugar, and vinegar, besides bread and vegetable, and even the flower is reduced to powder and mixed with snuff. Never transplanted and allowed to grow from its own suckers, this banana has now degenerated: it is easy to see, however, that it comes of a noble stock. In parts of the interior the people have during a portion of the year little else to live upon but this fruit, boiled, baked, and dried: it then becomes a nauseating diet, causing flatulence, indigestion, heart-burn, and other gastric evils. After enduring the infliction I never again could look a banana in the face.
Issuing from the dripping canopy, we breasted a steep goat-track, we forded a crystal burn, and having reached the midway we sat down to enjoy the rarified air, which felt as if a weight had been suddenly taken off our shoulders; it was São Paolo after Santos. A palpable change of climate had already taken place, and the sunshine was tempered with clouds which we now blessed. The view before us was extensive and suggestive, if not beautiful. The mountain fell under our feet in rugged folds clothed with patches of plantains, wild mulberries, custard apples, and stately trees whose lustrous green glittered against the red ochreous earth. The sarsaparilla vine hung in clusters and festoons from the high supporting limbs of the tamarind; the tall toddy-palm raised its fantastic arms over the dwarf fan palm, and bitter oranges mingled aroma with herbs not unlike our mint and sage. Opposite and below, half veiled with rank steam, the ‘smokes’ of Western Africa, lay the yellow Nyika and the Wazegura lowlands: it was traversed by a serpentine of trees marking the course of the Mkomafi, an affluent of the lower Panga-ni river. Three dwarf cones, the Mbara Hills, bearing 230° and distant about eight miles, crowned the desert, and far beyond the well-wooded line of the Rufu, a uniform purple plain stretched to the rim of the Southern and Western horizon, as far as our glasses could trace it.
We were startled from our observations by a prodigious hubbub. The three fresh porters positively refused to proceed unless a certain number of cloths were sent forwards to propitiate the magnates of Fuga. This trick was again easily traced to Wazira, who had been lecturing us all the morning upon the serious nature of our undertaking. Sultan Kimwere was a potent monarch, not a Mamba. His ‘ministers’ and councillors would, unless well-paid, avert from us their countenances. We must enter with discharge of musketry to salute the lieges, and by all means we must be good boys and do as we were bid. The Baloch smiled contempt, and pulling up the porters from the ground, loaded them deaf to all remonstrance.
Resuming our march with hearts beating aloud under the unusual exercise, we climbed, rather than walked, up the deep bed of a torrent,—everywhere the primitive zigzag. Villages then began to appear perched like eyries upon the hilltops, and villagers gathered to watch our approach. The Baloch asked us to taste the water of a spring that rose hard by: sparkling in the cup it was icy cold, with a perceptible chalybeate flavour, and the fountain-head was stained with a coat of rust. Eastern, and we may say Southern, Africa from the Equator to the Cape, is a land whose stones are iron, and the people declare that they have dug brass. Copper has been long known, gold even longer, and the diamond, in the South at least, is the discovery of this our day.[[39]]
At 4 P. M. we stood upon the Pass summit, but we found no tableland, as about Shoa. This patch of highlands, whose limits have been roughly laid down between N. lat. 1° and S. lat. 6°, is to the eastern regions what the massif of the Camarones and its system in N. lat. 5° is to Western Africa. The latter is known to be a volcano, and the former has been also reported of igneous formation;[[40]] here, however, it appears in the shape of granite and sandstones. Both are abnormal elevations, declining to the coast-fringing ranges, which latter correspond with our Eastern and Western Ghauts of Hindostan, and both, I may venture to predict, will in due time be colonized by white men. In the present day there is no better convict station than the Camarones mountain, and Usumbara might be preferred to the Andamans as a penitentiary for criminals who have deserved the Kálá pání.