526 MUAZI m KASUNGU. Chap. XXV. 



this kind of warfare is nearly always that in which the grass 

 is actually burnt off, or is so dry as readily to take fire. The 

 dry grass in Africa looks more like ripe English wheat late in 

 the autumn, than anything else we can compare it to. Let us 

 imagine an English village standing in a field of this sort, 

 bounded only by the horizon, and enemies setting fire to a 

 line of a mile or two, by running along with bunches of 

 burning straw in their hands, touching here and there the 

 inflammable material, — the wind blowing towards the doomed 

 village — the inhabitants with only one or two old muskets, 

 but ten to one no powder, — the long line of flames, leaping 

 thirty feet into the air with dense masses of black smoke — 

 and pieces of charred grass falling down in showers. Would 

 not the stoutest English villager, armed only with the bow 

 and arrow against the enemy's musket, quail at the idea of 

 breaking through that wall of fire ? When at a distance, we 

 once saw a scene like this, and had the charred grass, literally 

 as thick as flakes of black snow, falling around us, there was 

 no difficulty in understanding the secret of the slave-trader's 

 power. 



On the 21st of September, we arrived at the village of the 

 Chief Muasi, or Muazi ; it is surrounded by a stockade, and 

 embowered in very tall euphorbia-trees ; their height, thirty 

 or forty feet, shows that it has been inhabited for at least 

 one generation. A visitation of disease or death causes the 

 headmen to change the site of their villages, and plant new 

 hedges ; but, though Muazi has suffered from the attacks of 

 the Mazitu, he has evidently clung to his birthplace. The 

 village is situated about two miles south-west of a high hill 

 called Kasungu, which gives the name to a district extending 

 to the Loangwa of the Maravi. Several other detached granite 

 hills have been shot up on the plain, and many stockaded 

 villages, all owing allegiance to Muazi, are scattered over it. 



