THE DESICCATION OF AFRICA. I -JZ 



ancient bottom, fresh-water shells are thrown out, identical 

 with those now existing in Lake Ngami and the Zambesi. 

 The whole of these lakes was let out by means of cracks 

 or fissures made in the subtending sides by the upheaval 

 of the country. The fissure made at the Victoria Falls 

 let out the water of this great valley and left a small patch 

 in what was probably its deepest portion and is now called 

 Ngami. The Congo, also, finds its way to the sea through 

 a narrow channel. 



The greater Ngami found an outlet southwards down the 

 Botletle, to the Makarikari, the two sheets of water being thus 

 connected, like Albert and Albert Edward Nyanzas by the 

 Semliki River. Livingstone, who approached the Makarikari 

 in 1849, by way of the Makoko River, states ("Missionary 

 Travels," p. 61) that the Makoko below Lotlakani spreads out 

 into a very large lake, of which Ngami formed a very small 

 part. According to Chapman, who crossed the Ntwetwe Pan 

 several times, and who was on the eastern side of the depres- 

 sion in 1854, the banks on the east are abrupt and steep. The 

 older Bushmen told him that some thirty or forty years ago 

 the lake never dried up and abounded with hippopotamus, 

 crocodiles and fish. Suddenly, they said, the waters from 

 Lake Ngami ceased to flow, the lake dried up and the dead 

 fish and animals were devoured by the vultures. In Chap- 

 man's time the vast expanse of the Soa Pan was nothing but 

 a barren plain, level as a plank floor and covered with a white, 

 saline incrustation. This level plain became inundated during 

 some months of the year, assuming then a very grand appear- 

 ance, though only twelve to eighteen inches deep.* 



Aurel Schulz (1897) states that the natural outlet for the 

 Makarikari is through the Macloutsie Poort, down the Shashi 

 River and so to the Limpopo, but Chapman (loc. cit., p. 257), 

 who was in this angle of the depression, states that there is a 

 range of hills shutting in the view and directed S.W.-N.E. In 

 the same way other travellers maintain that the Gwai Poort is 

 the natural outlet, and that if the depression were to be filled 

 up, the water would flow down the Gwai River, and so into 

 the Zambesi below the Falls. Chapman discovered the Gwai 

 River, and he distinctly states that there is a big rise from the 

 Makarikari to the water-shed, and the fact that the Makarikari 

 was a lake at one time, rather discounts this view ; besides the 

 whole drainage on the east of the depression is towards the 

 pans, as shown by the Shua or Nata River. Livingstone recog- 

 nised that the original outlet was on the south, and he calls it 

 the old river that flowed through the Kalahari and joined the 

 Orange River. People who have been over this ground recently 



*J. Chapman, " Travels," London, 1868, vol. I., p. 242. 



