162 
VITALITY OF THE MOWAHA-TEEE. 
Chap. VIII. 
evident that such sportsmen are pretty far gone in the hunting 
form of insanity. 
]\Iy men shot a black rhinoceros in this way, and I felt glad to 
get away Irom the only place in which I ever had any share in 
night-hunting. We passed over the immense pan Ntwetwe, on 
which the latitude could be taken as at sea. Great tracts of 
this part of the country are of calcareous tufa, with only a thin 
coating of soil; numbers of “ baobab ” and mopane ” trees 
abound all over this hard smooth surface. About t>vo miles 
beyond the northern bank of the pan we unyoked under a 
hue specimen of the baobab, here called, in the language of 
Bechuanas, Mowana; it consisted of six branches united into one 
trunk. At three feet from the ground it was eighty-five feet in 
circumference. 
These mowana-trees are the most wonderful examples of vitahty 
in the country; it was therefore with surprise that we came uiDon 
a dead one at Tlomtla, a few miles beyond this spot. It is the 
same as those which Adanson and others believed, from specimens 
seen in Western Africa, to have been ahve before the flood. 
Argniing with a pecuhar mental idiosyncracy resembling colour¬ 
blindness, common among the French of the time, these savans 
came to the conclusion that therefore there never was any flood 
at all.” I would back a true mowana against a dozen floods, pro¬ 
vided you do not boil it in hot sea-water; but I cannot believe 
that any of those now alive had a chance of being subjected to 
the experiment of even the Noacliian deluge. The natives make 
a strong cord from the ^bres contained in the pounded bark. 
The wliole of the trunk, as high as they can reach, is consequently 
often quite denuded of its covering, which in the case of almost 
any other tree would cause its death, but this has no effect on the 
mowana except to make it throw out a new bark, which is done 
in the way of granulation. This stripping of the bark is repeated 
frequently, so that it is common to see the lower five or six feet an 
inch or two less in diameter than the parts above; even portions of 
the bark which have broken hi the process of being taken off, but 
remain separated from the parts below, though still connected with 
tlie tree above, continue to grow, and resemble closely marks made 
in the necks of the cattle of the island of Mull and of Caffre oxen, 
where a piece of skin is detached and allowed to hang down. No 
