234 THE BAEOTSE VALLEY. 



in Africa ; the very rocks are illiterate, they contain so few fossils. 

 Those here are of reddish variegated, hardened sandstone, with 

 madrepore holes in it. This, and broad horizontal strata of trap, 

 sometimes a hundred miles in extent, and each layer having an 

 inch or so of black silicious matter on it, as if it had floated there 

 while in a state of fusion, form a great part of the bottom of the 

 central valley. These rocks, in the southern part of the country 

 especially, are often covered with twelve or fifteen feet of soft cal- 

 careous tufa. At Bombwe we have the same trap, with radiated 

 zeolite, probably mesotype, and it again appears at the confluence 

 of the Chobe, farther down. 



As we passed up the river, the different villages of Banyeti 

 turned out to present Sekeletu with food and skins, as their trib- 

 ute. One large village is placed at Gonye, the inhabitants of 

 which are required to assist the Makololo to carry their canoes 

 past the falls. The tsetse here lighted on us even in the middle 

 of the stream. This we crossed repeatedly, in order to make 

 short cuts at bends of the river. The course is, however, re- 

 markably straight among the rocks ; and here the river is shallow, 

 on account of the great breadth of surface which it covers. When 

 we came to about 16° 16' S. latitude, the high wooded banks 

 seemed to leave the river, and no more tsetse appeared. Viewed 

 from the flat, reedy basin in which the river then flowed, the banks 

 seemed prolonged into ridges, of the same wooded character, two 

 or three hundred feet high, and stretched away to the N.N.E. 

 and N.N.W. until they were twenty or thirty miles apart. The 

 intervening space, nearly one hundred miles in length, with the 

 Leeambye winding gently near the middle, is the true Barotse 

 valley. It bears a close resemblance to the valley of the Nile, 

 and is inundated annually, not by rains, but by the Leeambye, 

 exactly as Lower Egypt is flooded by the Nile. The villages of 

 the Barotse are built on mounds, some of which are said to have 

 been raised artificially by Santuru, a former chief of the Barotse, 

 and during the inundation the whole valley assumes the appear- 

 ance of a large lake, with the villages on the mounds like isl- 

 ands, just as occurs in Egypt with the villages of the Egyptians. 

 Some portion of the waters of inundation comes from the north- 

 west, where great floodings also occur, but more comes from the 

 north and northeast, descending the bed of the Leeambye itself. 



