214 
THE BAEOTSE YALLEY. 
Chap. XII. 
lip in Africa; the very rocks are illiterate, they contain so few 
fossils. Those here are of reddish variegated hardened sandstone 
with madrepore-holes in it. This, and broad horizontal strata of 
trap, sometimes a hundred miles in extent, and each layer having 
an inch or so of black silicioiis matter on it, as if it had floated there 
while in a state of fusion, form a great part of the bottom of the 
central valley. These rocks, in the southern part of the country 
especially, are often covered with twelve or flfteen feet of soft 
calcareous tufa. At Bombwe we have the same trap, with radi¬ 
ated zeolite, probably mesotype, and it again appears at the 
confluence of the Chobe, further down. 
As we passed up the river, the different villages’of Banyeti 
turned out to present Sekeletu with food and skins, as their 
tribute. One large village is placed at Gonye, the inhabitants 
of which are requhed to assist the Makololo to carry their canoes 
past the falls. The tsetse here lighted on us even in the middle 
of the stream. This we crossed repeatedly, in order to make 
short cuts at bends of the river. The course is however remark¬ 
ably straight among the rocks; and here the river is shallow, on 
account of the great breadth of smTace wliich it covers. When 
we came to about 16° 16' S. latitude, the high wooded banks 
seemed to leave the river, and no more tsetse appeared. Viewed 
from the flat reedy basin in wliich the river then flowed, the 
banks seemed prolonged into ridges of the same wooded character 
two or three huncbed feet high, and stretched away to the N.N.E. 
and N.N.W. until they were twenty or thirty miles apart. The 
intervening space, nearly one hundred miles in length, with the 
Leeambye winding gently near the middle, is the true Barotse 
valley. It bears a close resemblance to the valley of the Nile, 
and is inundated annually, not by rains, but by the Leeambye, 
exactly as Lower Egypt is flooded by the Nile. The villages of 
the Barotse are built on mounds, some of which are said to have 
been raised artificially by Santuru, a former chief of the Barotse, 
and during the inundation the whole valley assumes the appear¬ 
ance of a large lake, with the villages on the mounds like islands, 
just as occurs in Egypt with the villages of the Egyptians. Some 
portion of the waters of inundation comes from the north-west, 
where gveat floodings also occur, but more comes from the north 
and north-east, descending the bed of the Leeambye itself. 
