"god took him." 459 



to go out that way, but wandered, so the ladies sent a ser- 

 vant to conduct me out in the direction I wished to go, and 

 we found egress by passing through some huts with two doors 

 in them. 



"September 17. — We marched down from Mukate's and to 

 about the middle of the Lakelet Pamalombe. Mukate had no 

 people with canoes near the usual crossing place, and he sent a 

 messenger to see that we were fairly served. Here we got the 

 Manganja head men to confess that an earthquake had happened; 

 all the others we have inquired of have denied it ; why, I cannot 

 conceive. The old men said that they had felt earthquakes 

 twice, ouce near sunset and the next time at night — they shook 

 everything, and were accompanied with noise, and all the fowls 

 cackled ; there was no effect on the lake observed. They profess 

 ignorance of any tradition of the water having stood higher. 

 Their traditions say that they came originally from the west, or 

 west-northwest, which they call ' Maravi ; ' and that their fore- 

 fathers taught them to make nets and kill fish. They have no 

 trace of any teaching by a higher instructor ; no carvings or 

 writings on the rocks ; and they never heard of a book until we 

 came among them. Their forefathers never told them that after 

 or at death they went to God, but they had heard it said of such 

 a one who died, ' God took him.' " 



From the village of Mukate Livingstone was provided with 

 a number of canoes in which he and his company passed up to 

 the point of junction between the Lakelet Pamalombe and Lake 

 Nyassa ; but the people were very timid, and he was under the 

 necessity of going on to Mponda's, which lies just south of 

 Nyassa. 



In coming from the coast to the lake Livingstone had con- 

 siderable trouble in conversing with the natives. All along 

 that route the Waiyau language prevails — a language confes- 

 sedly hard to master. It was a great relief among the tribes 

 about this lake to observe a striking similarity of the language 

 to that in use along the Zambesi and the Shire. They were 

 again surrounded by those ferocious beasts which are so inti- 

 mately associated with African travel in the mind of almost 

 every reader. The first day of their stay, at Mponda's town a 

 woman was carried off by a lion, and almost entirely eaten 



