382 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
The Governor informed me that in the previous year 
two strangers—white men—had come from Quillimane 
with a view to prospect the gold resources of the Amazoe 
river (numerous affluents of which we crossed on our 
journey), which flows into the Luenha, and thence to the 
Zambesi, about twenty miles below Tette. Unhappily, 
disaster followed them. One died of the fever, and the 
other was forced to return to the coast in a lamentably 
sickly condition. 
I paid a visit to the Jesuit Fathers, of whom two were 
French and one Hungarian. Fever seemed to have 
affected them greatly, their ghost-like forms being very 
unpleasant to look upon, the result, probably, of the 
exceedingly sedentary life they led, coupled with the 
circumstance of their being; stationed so Ions; in one 
place. Their companions were a few very unhealthy- 
looking little boys—orphans—evidently half-castes. 
Should any one desire to have a relative buried with 
a service by the priests, the Jesuit Father, bearing a 
cross, leads the funeral procession, with a number of 
little boys robed in white. One of these funerals I 
witnessed, and was astonished to remark how very few 
people followed; none, in fact, save the relatives of the 
deceased. No crowd was attracted. This may be looked 
upon as another example of the slowness of the native 
to imitate the customs of the white man. A more com¬ 
monplace, but perhaps more significant, instance is that 
neither coffee, tea, nor sugar have ever pleased the 
palates of the native inhabitants of Tette, who still 
prefer to imbibe their unvarying beverage, the simply- 
concocted beer. 
The races of the Zambesi valley are very dark-skinned, 
much more so than the people I have encountered on the 
high lands. Possibly this is what impressed Living¬ 
stone, who in one of his books has remarked that moisture 
and heat produced the blackest types of man. 
The vitality of the people is wonderful. On the 
morning after a birth the happy mother may be seen 
again in the fields, seated under the shade of a tree, with 
the new arrival swathed in cloths and slung on her back, 
