480 GEOLOGY. Chap. XXIII. 



The rest is all rapid, and much of it being only fifty or eighty 

 yards wide, and rushing like a mill-race, it gives the im- 

 pression of water-power, sufficient to drive all the mills in 

 Manchester, running to waste. Pamofunda, or Pamozima, 

 has a deep shady grove on its right bank. When we were 

 walking alone through its dark shade, we were startled 

 by a shocking smell like that of a dissecting-room ; and 

 on looking up saw dead bodies in mats suspended from the 

 branches of the trees, a mode of burial somewhat similar to 

 that which we subsequently saw practised by the Parsees in 

 their " towers of silence " at Poonah near Bombay. The 

 name Pamozima means, " the departed spirits or gods " — 

 a fit name for a place over which, according to the popular 

 belief, the disembodied souls continually hover. 



The rock lowest down in the series is dark reddish-grey 

 syenite. This seems to have been an upheaving agent, 

 for the mica schists above it are much disturbed. Dark 

 trappean rocks full of hornblende have in many places burst 

 through these schists, and appear in nodules on the surface. 

 The highest rock seen is a fine sandstone of closer gram than 

 that at Tette, and quite metamorphosed where it comes into 

 contact with the igneous rocks below it. It sometimes gives 

 place to quartz and reddish clay schists, much baked by heat. 

 This is the usual geological condition on the right bank of 

 the Cataracts. On the other side we pass over masses of 

 porphyritic trap, in contact with the same mica schists, and 

 these probably give to the soil the great fertility we ob- 

 served. The great body of the mountains is syenite. So 

 much mica is washed into the river, that on looking atten- 

 tively on the stream one sees myriads of particles floating 

 and glancing in the sun ; and this, too, even at low water. 



