20 
THE NEW AFRICA 
Fourteen days of good trekking brought us to the Makari- 
kari lake, a large, shallow salt pan, into which the remnants of 
the Okavango river empty themselves, without finding an outlet, 
after the river has nearly exhausted itself in supplying Lake 
Ngami and the enormous swamps lying in its course with water, 
although I believe that at some previous time there was a 
communication from the Makarikari to the Limpopo river down 
the Shasha river-bed. As will be seen later, the Okavango 
river largely exhausts its supplies in the great marshes lying 
west of and around Lake Ngabe (Ngami), and finally, after 
passing through the Zouga or Botletle swamps, has just enough 
water left to maintain the level of the Makarikari lake, from 
whose comparatively vast surface evaporation into the exceed¬ 
ingly dry atmosphere is sufficient to dispose of any surplus. 
The theory that the Makarikari once communicated with the 
Limpopo river is supported by the sudden breaking away south- 
eastwards of the country, and the formation of volcanic dikes at 
the south-east extreme of the lake, damming the outlet and inter¬ 
rupting the continuity of an outflow eastwards. At the time the 
Okavango flowed into the Limpopo, this river must have been 
an imposing stream, and one of the longest in South Africa. 
The damming of the outlet, however, has resulted in the formation 
of this shallow lake, some six thousand square miles in extent. 
The water in the lake is intensely brackish or salt, and natives 
inform us that after a heavy inundation of the lake, the water, 
on drying up, leaves cakes of salt deposited in suitable localities, 
where pools of water have been cut off by the receding flood and 
left to dry out, in support of which assertion on our return 
journey they brought us a cake of this salt, good in quality, 
and weighing several pounds. 
The eastern shore of the lake is intersected in its grass and 
bush-grown plain by innumerable winding, sand-bedded, dry 
creeks, which form an intricate labyrinth for miles inland, 
doubtless filled by water at times of flood. Here many kinds of 
game congregate in numbers; elands, blue wildebeest, quagga, 
and springboks in large herds were the principal sorts we met 
