882 LIFE OF DA VID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



esque town, where there is a considerable trade carried on in inandioca root 

 and its different preparations, as well as in beans and ground-nuts. After 

 passing this town the road becomes exceedingly rocky and stony, until the 

 small town of Quioanquilla is reached. A large quantity of wild pine-apples 

 grow around this town, but the natives make no use of its fine fibre, contenting 

 themselves with eating the unripe fruit. 



The largest and most important town on the road to Bembe is Quilumbo, 

 beautifully situated in a forest, and with a great number of oil-palm trees. 

 It contains several hundred huts and quite a swarm of inhabitants. Proceed- 

 ing thence, and passing through pretty undulating country covered principally 

 with high grass, you at last reach Bembe, a distance of not less than a hundred 

 and thirty miles from Ambriz. 



" Bembe is the third great elevation, and it stands boldly and cliff-like out 

 of the broad plain, and at its base runs the little River Luguria. Approaching 

 it from the westward, we see a high mountain to the right of the plateau of 

 Bembe, separated from it by a narrow gorge thickly wooded, that drains the 

 valley, separating in its turn the table-land of Bembe from the high flat coun- 

 try beyond, in a north and easterly direction. This valley, in which a great 

 deposit of malachite exists, is about a mile long in a straight line, and runs 

 N.N.W. by S.S.E. 



" The malachite is often found in large solid blocks. One, resting on 

 two smaller ones, weighed together a little over three tons, but it occurs mostly 

 in flat veins without any definite dip or order, swelling sometimes to upwards 

 of two feet in thickness, and much fissured in character from admixture with 

 dark oxide of iron, with which it is often cemented to the clay in which it is 

 contained. Two kinds of clay are found, a ferruginous red, and an unctuous 

 black variety. The malachite occurs almost entirely in the former. A large 

 proportion is obtained in the form of a small irregularly-shaped shot, by wash- 

 ing the clay in suitable apparatus. Large quantities had been raised by the 

 natives from this valley before the country was taken possession of by the 

 Portuguese." 



At the end of the valley, where it joins the narrow gorge that drains it, 

 an enormous mass of very hard metamorphic limestone, destitute of fossil re- 

 mains, rises from the bottom to a height of about thirty feet, and in it are 

 contained two caverns or large chambers. This mass of rock is imbedded in 

 a dense forest, and is overgrown by trees and enormous creepers, the stems 

 of which, like great twisted cables, hang down through the crevices and open- 

 ings to the ground below. " Great numbers of bats," says Mr. Monteiro, 

 " inhabit the roof of the darkest of these caverns, and some that I once shot 

 were greatly infested with a large, and very active, nearly white species of 

 she curious spider-looking parasite Nyctirbia, that lives on this class of ani- 

 mals. In the thick damp shade of the trees surrounding this mass of rock, 



