138 THE BONDS OF AFRICA 



steamer on the river. Close to N'Temia the 

 great mass of Mount Moramballa rears itself up 

 from the low-lying bush country, and this 

 mountain has, I was told, been viewed from 

 the coast, although I should hardly think it 

 possible. 



It was somewhere in this country that, not so 

 very many years ago, the warlike Massengere 

 lived, a people who seem to have altogether 

 disappeared from the face of the land, as more 

 than one other tribe in this mysterious Africa 

 has done. 



At Villa Bocage I found the Centipede, another 

 stern-wheeler of the British Central Africa Com- 

 pany, substantially larger than the Scorpion, and 

 drawing twenty-two or twenty-three inches of 

 water. An agent of the British Central Africa 

 Company and a Portuguee constitute the white 

 population of Villa Bocage, but a little farther 

 down the river there is quite a little British 

 colony — consisting of three — planting cotton for 

 the Companhia da Zambezia on Pompona Island. 

 It is in byways of the world like Pompona that 

 one meets the greatest wanderers, not in the 

 crowded thoroughfares of big cities with scientific 

 and geographical institutions. Men who have 

 travelled across a continent generally have a 

 way of burying themselves somewhere in its 

 recesses where the world knows them not. 

 There is such a one on Pompona, a man who 

 seems to know Africa from the south to the 

 Masai steppes, and who told me that he had 

 wandered from German East Africa across to 

 Lake Chad, and then through the Congo to 

 the Luangwa River ! Down the river steamed 

 the Centipede (her skipper often troubled by 

 sandbanks and stony bottoms) ; on past the 



