482 PROJECT FOR A MAKOLOLO VILLAGE. Chap. XXIV. 



Leaving Katema's town on the 19th, and proceeding four miles 

 to the eastward, we forded the southern branch of Lake Dilolo. 

 We found it a mile and a quarter broad ; and as it flows into the 

 Lotembwa, the lake would seem to be a drain of the surrounding 

 flats, and to partake of the character of a fountain. The ford was 

 waist-deep, and very difficult, from the masses of arum and rushes 

 through winch we waded. Going to the eastward about three 

 miles, we came to the Southern Lotembwa itself, running in a 

 valley two miles broad. It is here eighty or ninety yards wide, 

 and contains numerous islands covered with dense sylvan vegeta- 

 tion. In the rainy season the valley is flooded, and as the waters 

 dry up, great multitudes of fish are caught. This happens very 

 extensively over the country, and fishing-weirs are met with every- 

 where. A species of small fish, about the size of the minnow, is 

 caught in bagfuls, and dried in the sun. The taste is a pungent 

 aromatic bitter, and it was partaken of freely by my people, 

 although they had never met with it before. On many of the 

 paths which had been flooded, a nasty sort of slirne of decayed 

 vegetable matter is left behind, and much sickness prevails during 

 the drying up of the water. We did not find our friend Mozinkwa 

 at his pleasant home on the Lokaloeje ; his wife was dead, and he 

 had removed elsewhere. He followed us some distance, but our 

 reappearance seemed to stir up his sorrows. We found the pontoon 

 at the village in which we left it. It had been carefully preserved ; 

 but a mouse had eaten a hole in it, and rendered it useless. 



We traversed the extended plain on the north bank of the 

 Leeba, and crossed this river a little farther on at Kanyonke's 

 village, which is about twenty miles west of the Peri hills, our 

 former ford. The first stage beyond the Leeba, was at the rivulet 

 Loambo, by the village of Chebende, nephew of Shinte ; and next 

 day, we met Chebende himself, returning from the funeral of 

 Samoana, his father. He was thin and haggard-looking, compared 

 to what he had been before, the probable effect of the orgies in 

 which he had been engaged. Pitsane and Mohorisi, having con- 

 cocted the project of a Makololo village on the banks of the Leeba, 

 as an approach to the white man's market, spoke to Chebende, 

 as an influential man, on the subject, but he cautiously avoided 

 expressing an opinion. The idea which had sprung up in their 

 own minds of an establishment somewhere near the confluence of 



