246 
EASTERN ETHIOPIA 
XIX 
A large island in the lake is inhabited. The people 
who live on it cultivate the soil, and use canoes of 
peculiar construction but “ as light as corks/’ Major 
Powell-Cotton has carefully described these canoes: 
they are built of the stems of the ambatch, a plant 
which grows near the margin of the lake and attains a 
lieight of fifteen feet: it has a fairly straight stem, the 
Ijark is furnished with thorns, and its orange flowers are 
like those of the bean. When dry, the stem being filled 
with pith, it is extremely light. The ambatch grows 
rapidly and as its roots merely dip into the water and 
mud, large clusters of this plant are easily detached by 
wind or by current and form floating islands. 
The canoes on Lake Baringoare about 90 inches long 
and thirty wide : the sides are seventeen inches deep, 
and the bows higher and wider than the stern. The 
ambatch stems are bound together with the inner bark 
of the thorn tree, and the seams are caulked with drift 
vegetable matter found near the margin of the lake. 
They are propelled at the rate of three miles an hour by 
means of two wooden paddles, and are built to hold two 
men. These ambatch canoes remind one of the coracle 
of the ancient Britons. (The coracle is used to-day by 
the fishermen on the river AVye.) Bafts made of 
ambatch stems are used by the Shilluks on the upper 
reaches of the AVhite Nile ; the ambatch plant flourishes 
in, and is an important constituent of the sudd. 
Thomson expressed the opinion that the formation of 
lake Baringo was due to a secondary subsidence in the 
Bift Valley, and that the island was the upper part of 
the cone of a volcano which had disappeared by sinking 
below the level of the surrounding country, forming in 
consequence a receptacle for the water of the lake. 
This view has been confirmed. Major Powell-Cotton 
(1902) foundthe islandhad all the appearance ofasunken 
crater. It had an average diameter of a mile. At a 
place called Labourri, quite close to the edge of the lake, 
there is a little bright green plot, some eighty yards 
