278 LIFE OF DAVID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



himself for three-and-thirty yard-pieces of cloth. With two of the pieces he 

 bought a man, a woman, and a child ; afterwards he bought more slaves, and 

 owned a sufficient number to man one of the large canoes with which the trade 

 of the river is carried on. Major Sicard subsequently employed him in car- 

 rying ivory and other merchandise to Kilimane, and gave cloth to his men 

 for the voyage. The Portuguese, as a rule, are very kind to their slaves ; but 

 the half-castes are cruel slave-holders. Livingstone quotes a saying of a hu- 

 mane Portuguese which indicates the reputation they bear: — "God made 

 white men, and God made black men ; but the devil made half-castes." 



The party visited and examined the Kebra-basa Rapids, and found them 

 very formidable barriers to the navigation of the river. They are so called 

 from a range of rocky mountains which cross the Zambesi at that spot. The 

 river, during the dry season, is confined to a narrow channel, through which 

 the water forces itself, boiling and eddying within a channel of not more than 

 sixty yards in width, the top of the masts of the Ma-Robert, although thirty 

 feet high, not reaching to the flood-mark on the rocky sides. The whole bed 

 and banks of the stream are broken by huge masses of rock of every 

 imaginable shape. The rapids extend for upwards of eight miles, and could 

 only be passed by a steamer during the floods. The march along the banks 

 of the river among the rocks, which were so hot from the heat of the sun as 

 to blister the bare feet of the Makololo men, was most fatiguing. Several 

 miles above these rapids is the cataract of Morumbwa, where the river is 

 jammed into a cavity of not more than fifty yards in width ; with a fall of 

 twenty feet in a slope of thirty yards. During floods it is navigable, the 

 rapids being all but obliterated through the great rise in the river, the rocks 

 showing a flood mark eighty feet above the level of the stream. 



Dr. Livingstone's account of the rapids and the country in the neighbour- 

 hood, as given in his letters to the Foreign Offices, is so interesting that 

 we give several extracts here : — 



" They were not seen by me in 1856, and, strange as it may appear, no 

 one else could be found who could give an account of any part except the 

 commencement, about 30 miles above this. The only person who had possessed 

 curiosity enough to ascend a few miles, described it as a number of detached 

 rocks jutting out across the stream, rendering the channel tortuous and 

 dangerous. A mountain called Panda Maboa (Copper Mountain — a mass of 

 saccharine marble at the top, contains joints of the green carbonate of copper, 

 which is said to have been worked — hence the name) stretches out towards the 

 range of hills on the eastern bank, so as to narrow the river to 60 or 80 yards. 

 This is the commencement of Kebra, or, more correctly, Kebra-basa. We 

 went about four miles beyond Panda Maboa, in this little steamer, and soon 

 saw that the difficulty is caused by the Zambesi being confined by mountains 

 to a bed scarcely a quarter of a mile broad. This bed, viewed from a height, 



