NO MONUMENTS IN AFRICA. Ill 



versy with their neighbors. Nearly all the quarrelling in the 

 country is about cattle. The tsetse partly, and partly their 

 desire to live peaceable, incline these people to their chosen 

 handicraft in preference to having herds. Dr. Livingstone 

 never knew war in this whole region except on a cattle ques- 

 tion, but in a single instance ; then the trouble was like that of 

 which old Homer sings — a woman. But women are considered 

 among the necessaries of life, so the Manyeti hazard war rather 

 than banish all the women. 



From Ivatima-molelo northward there is a succession of 

 rapids, falls and cataracts which make the progress difficult and 

 dangerous. The party were obliged to carry their canoes around 

 some of these places ; sometimes more than a mile would thus 

 be traversed, bearing their boats on their shoulders. At Gonye 

 the main body of the water is collected within about seventy 

 yards, and leaps about thirty feet; the entire mass falling against 

 a huge projecting rock, causes a sound which is heard far away. 

 There are various traditions of sudden death to hapless travel- 

 lers floating about this spot. But whatever has been, there are 

 no memorials more substantial than the imperfect traditions. 

 There is nothing in all these wilds to commemorate the past ; 

 the dead are rarely spoken of; there are no monuments in all 

 Africa; "the very rocks are illiterate;" hidden in them are no 

 curious shapes and characters, nothing to interest or tempt the 

 attentions of science as in other rocks. 



About the 16° S. latitude the party entered the true Barotse 

 valley. The forests fall back gradually from the banks of the 

 river, until they are only seen across the fringe of reeds and a 

 flat, fertile tract some twenty miles apart. Like the valley of 

 the Nile, this valley is subject to an annual overflow from the 

 river, which winds along its centre. The villages of the 

 Barotse, built on artificial mounds, dot the Avhole expanse, and 

 sit there like teeming islands while the waters of the overflow 

 spread around them. The people love their homes beside the 

 splendid stream — a home where " hunger never comes." But 

 comfortable though these poor people think they are, like all of 

 this wild country this noble valley is waiting for the hand of 

 intelligence to find its real treasures. In one of these Barotse 

 towns Livingstone witnessed a specimen of Makololo authority 



