THE GREAT CENTRAL DEPRESSION. 



409 



The Sultan Mzogera had sold his permission to cross 

 the river. The Mutware, or Mutwale, the Lord of the 

 Ferry, now required payment for his canoes. 



Whilst delayed at Ugaga by the scabrous question of 

 how much was to be extracted from me, I will enter into 

 a few geographical details concerning the Malaga razi 

 River. 



The Malagarazi, corrupted by speculative geographers 

 to Mdjigidgi, — the uneuphonious terminology of the 

 "Mombas Mission Map," —to " Magrassie " and to " Ma- 

 gozi," has been wrongly represented to issue from the 

 Sea of Ujiji. According to all travellers in these re- 

 gions, it arises in the mountains of Urundi, at no great 

 distance from the Kitangure, or River of Karagwah ; but 

 whilst the latter, springing from the upper counterslope, 

 feeds the Nyanza or Northern Lake, the Malaga razi, 

 rising in the lower slope of the equatorial range, trends 

 to the south-east, till it becomes entangled in the decline 

 of the Great Central African Depression — the hydrogra- 

 phical basin first indicated in his Address of 1852 by 

 Sir Roderick I. Murchison, President of the Royal Geo- 

 graphical Society of London.* Thence it sweeps round 



* The following notice concerning a discovery which must ever b3 re- 

 membered as a triumph of geological hypothesis, was kindly forwarded to 

 me by the discoverer : — 



" My speculations as to the whole African interior being a vast watery 

 plateau-land of some elevation above the sea, but subtended on the east and 

 west by much higher grounds, were based on the following data : — 



"The discovery in the central portion of the Cape colony, by Mr. Bain, 

 of fossil remains in a lacustrine deposit of secondary age, and the well- 

 known existence on the coast of loftier mountains known to be of a Palaeozoic 

 or primary epoch and circling round the younger deposits, being followed by 

 the exploration of the Ngami Lake, justified me in believing that Africa had 

 been raised from beneath the ocean at a very early geological period ; and 

 that ever since that time the same conditions had prevailed. I thence in- 

 ferred that an interior network of lakes and rivers would be found prolonged 

 northwards from Lake Ngami, though at that time no map was known to 

 me showing the existence of such central reservoirs. Looking to the 



