51 G LAKE DILOLO. 



I often observed, while on a portion of the partition, that the air 

 by night was generally quite still, but as soon as the sun's rays 

 began to shoot across the upper strata of the atmosphere in the 

 early morning, a copious discharge came suddenly down from the 

 accumulated clouds. It always reminded me of the experiment 

 of putting a rod into a saturated solution of a certain salt, causing 

 instant crystallization. This, too, was the period when I often ob- 

 served the greatest amount of cold. 



After crossing the Northern Lotembwa we met a party of the 

 people of Kangenke, who had treated us kindly on our way to the 

 north, and sent him a robe of striped calico, with an explanation 

 of the reason for not returning through his village. We then went 

 on to the Lake Dilolo. It is a fine sheet of water, six or eight 

 miles long, and one or two broad, and somewhat of a triangular 

 shape. A branch proceeds from one of the angles, and flows into 

 the Southern Lotembwa. Though laboring under fever, the sight 

 of the blue waters, and the waves lashing the shore, had a most 

 soothing influence on the mind, after so much of lifeless, flat, and 

 gloomy forest. The heart yearned for the vivid impressions which 

 are always created by the sight of the broad expanse of the grand 

 old ocean. That has life in it ; but the flat uniformities over 

 which we had roamed made me feel as if buried alive. We found 

 Moene Dilolo (Lord of the Lake) a fat, jolly fellow, who lamented 

 that when they had no strangers they had plenty of beer, and al- 

 ways none when they came. He gave us a handsome present of 

 meal and putrid buffalo's flesh. Meat can not be too far gone for 

 them, as it is used only in small quantities, as a sauce to their 

 tasteless manioc. They were at this time hunting antelopes, in 

 order to send the skins as a tribute to Matiamvo. Great quanti- 

 ties of fish are caught in the lake ; and numbers of young water- 

 fowl are now found in the nests among the reeds. 



Our progress had always been slow, and I found that our rate 

 of traveling could only be five hours a day for five successive days. 

 On the sixth, both men and oxen showed symptoms of knocking 

 up. We never exceeded two and a half or three miles an hour in 

 a straight line, though all were anxious to get home. The differ- 

 ence in the rate of traveling between ourselves and the slave- 

 traders was our having a rather quicker step, a longer day's jour- 

 ney, and twenty traveling days a month instead of their ten. 



