WHAT THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE 
l 7 
scene before us is an indescribable wilderness of stones and boulders which look 
as though they had been hurled right and left from some central eruption. 1 
On the left-hand side stretches an arid plain of loose friable soil once formed 
below the water, and white with the lime of decomposed shells blazing in the 
reverberating sunshine of noonday—the refracted heat of its surface so great 
that the horizon quivers in wavy lines before our half-blinded eyes; on the 
other side a papyrus marsh with open pools of stagnant water. Beyond the 
arid waste of light soil on which a few grey wisps of grass are growing, lie 
the deep blue waters of a lake—almost an indigo blue at noonday and seen 
from this angle. Behind the papyrus marsh is a line of pale blue-grey 
mountains — a flat wash of colour, all detail veiled by the heat haze. We 
are at the mouth of a great river and the marshes on one side of us repre¬ 
sent either its abandoned channels half dried up or its back water at times 
of overflow. For a mile or so the eye, turning away with relief from the 
scorching, bleached, barren plain which lies between us and the lake, looks 
over many acres of apple-green papyrus. The papyrus, as you will observe, is 
a rush with a smooth, round, tubelike stem, sometimes as much as six feet in 
height. The stem terminates in a great mop-head of delicate green filaments 
which are often bifid at their ends. Three or four narrow leaflets surround the 
core from which the filaments diverge. If the papyrus be in flower small 
yellow-green nodules dot the web of the filaments. With the exception of 
this inflorescence the whole rush—stem, leaves, and mop-head—is a pure apple- 
green and the filaments are like shining silk. 
The water in the open patches in between the islands and peninsulas of 
papyrus is quite stagnant and unruffled and seemingly clear. Sometimes the 
water is black and fcetid but its tendency to corruption is often kept in check 
by an immense growth of huge duck weed,—the Pistia stratiotes , for all the 
world like a pale green lettuce. 
A pair of saddle-billed storks are wading through the marsh, searching 
for fish and frogs and snakes. Their huge beaks are crimson-scarlet, with 
a black band, and their bodies are boldly divided in coloration between snowy 
white, inky-black, and bronze-green. 
On Lake Nyasa. The steamer on which you are a passenger, in imagina¬ 
tion, has left her safe anchorage in the huge harbour of Kotakota in the early 
morning and rounding the long sandspit which shields the inlet from the open 
lake, finds herself breasting a short, choppy sea. The waves at first are a 
muddy green where the water is shallow but soon this colour changes to a deep, 
cold, unlovely indigo. A strong southern breeze is blowing in your teeth and 
each billow is crested with white foam. The “ Mwera ” or south-easter—the 
wind which ravages the lake at certain times—is to-day against you, and you 
are condemned by circumstances to steam southwards opposed by this strong 
gale. As you get out into the middle of the lake the situation is almost one 
of danger, for the vessel on which you are travelling, though dignified with the 
name of “steamer,” is not much larger than a Thames steam launch. In such 
weather as this she could not possibly go far with the billows on her beam 
1 These isolated fragments of granitic rock are found miles away from the Mlanje mountain in the 
plains below bearing all the appearance of having been hurled through the air for miles into the surround¬ 
ing country. Mlanje mountain is evidently a large slice left of the pre-existing tableland from which 
again volcanic cones have risen. 
2 
