222 ANCIENT STATE OF COUNTEY. Chap. XL 



one eye, and scabby ; the horns, mere stumps, not a foot long, 

 must have atrophied, when by age he lost the strength dis- 

 tinctive of his sex ; some eighteen or twenty inches of horn 

 could not well be worn down by mere rubbing against the 

 trees. We saw many buffaloes next day, standing quietly 

 amidst a thick thorn-jungle, through which we were passing. 

 They often stood until we were within fifty or a hundred 

 yards of them. 



We had always mountains before us in the distance, and 

 sometimes passed through hills that come close to or inter- 

 sect the river. This is the case with those called Moio. 

 They are generally of igneous or metamorphic rocks, clay- 

 slate, or trap, with porcellanite and zeolite ; the principal rock 

 in the central part of the country, where no syenite or 

 gneiss had been upheaved, seems to be a grey coarse sand- 

 stone, known to us by the name of Tette sandstone. Large 

 masses of it still lie horizontally or only slightly inclined. 

 When much disturbed, it has been tilted up by the eruption 

 of igneous rocks, and near the point of contact it has either 

 been hardened or melted, and the coal which elsewhere still 

 lies under the undisturbed stratum, is crystallized or entirely 

 burned. The igneous rocks often form dykes, as that called 

 Nakabele, which stretches like a dam across the western 

 entrance to the Kariba gorge. In the vicinity of the erupted 

 rocks we usually meet soft calcareous tufa, as if, after the 

 igneous action, many hot fountains flowing had deposited lime 

 from their water. 



Previous, however, to this period of eruption and upheaval, 

 it is probable that the sandstone formed the bed of prodi- 

 gious inland seas, along the low shores of which the plants 

 of the coaL flourished, succeeded, as the land was gradually 

 elevated, by the trees we now find silicified on the surface ; 



