406 FACE OF THE COUNTRY. Chap. XXX. 



one is elected. Our guides were carrying dried buffalo's 

 meat to the market at Tete as a private speculation. 



As we avoided human habitations, I had an opportunity 01 

 observing the expedients my party resorted to in ord^r to 

 supply their wants. They consumed various vegetable pro- 

 ductions, such as large mushrooms which grew on the anthills, 

 a tuber named " mokiiri," and another about the size of a 

 turnip named " bonga," which has a sensible amount of salt 

 in it. They also gathered a fruit called " ndongo " by the 

 Makololo, and " dongolo " by the Bambiri, resembling a small 

 plum, which becomes black when ripe, and is good food, as 

 the seeds are small. The gravel and the sand, of which this 

 district is composed, drain away the water so effectually that 

 the trees, being exposed to violent heat without moisture, 

 often become scrubby. The rivers are all of the sandy kind, 

 and we pass over large beds between this and Tete, which in 

 the dry season contain no water. Close on our south the hills 

 of Lokole rise to a considerable height, beyond which flows 

 the Mazoe with its golden sands. The great numbers of pot- 

 holes on the sides of sandstone ridges, when viewed in con- 

 nection with the large banks of rolled shingle and washed 

 sand which are met with on this side of the eastern ridge, may 

 indicate that the sea in former times rolled its waves along its 

 flanks. Many of the hills between the Kafue and Loangwa 

 have their sides of the form seen in mud-banks left by the 

 tide. The pot-holes appear most abundant on low grey sand- 

 stone ridges here ; and as the shingle is composed of the same 

 rocks as the hills west of Zumbo, it looks as if a current had 

 dashed along from the south-east in the line in which the pot- 

 holes now appear, and was thence deflected towards the Maravi 

 country, north of Tete, where it may have hollowed out the 

 rounded water- wo in caverns in which these people store their 

 corn and hide themselves from their enemies. In this case 

 the form of this part of the continent must once have re- 

 sembled the curves or indentations seen on the southern 

 extremity of the American continent. 



We were tolerably successful in avoiding the villages, and 

 slept one night on the flanks of the hill Zimika, where a great 

 number of deep pot-holes afforded an abundant supply of good 

 rain-water. Here, for the first time, w r e saw hills with bare, 



