第129章

Livingstone's journey to the West Coast, and its feeders was to the north-east, or somewhat in the same direction.Whether the water thus drained off finds its way out by the Congo, or by the Nile, has not yet been ascertained.Some parts of the continent have been said to resemble an inverted dinner-plate.This portion seems more of the shape, if shape it has, of a wide-awake hat, with the crown a little depressed.The altitude of the brim in some parts is considerable;

In others, as at Tette and the bottom of Murchison's Cataracts, it is so small that it could be ascertained only by eliminating the daily variations of the barometer, by simultaneous observations on the Coast, and at points some two or three hundred miles inland.So long as African rivers remain in what we may call the brim, they present no obstructions; but no sooner do they emerge from the higher lands than their utility is impaired by cataracts.The low lying belt is very irregular.At times sloping up in the manner of the rim of an inverted dinner-plate--while in other cases, a high ridge rises near the sea, to be succeeded by a lower district inland before we reach the central plateau.The breadth of the low lands is sometimes as much as three hundred miles, and that breadth determines the limits of navigation from the seaward.

We made three long marches beyond Muazi's in a north-westerly direction; the people were civil enough, but refused to sell us any food.We were travelling too fast, they said; in fact, they were startled, and before they recovered their surprise, we were obliged to depart.We suspected that Muazi had sent them orders to refuse us food, that we might thus be prevented from going into the depopulated district; but this may have been mere suspicion, the result of our own uncharitable feelings.

We spent one night at Machambwe's village, and another at Chimbuzi's.

It is seldom that we can find the headman on first entering a village.He gets out of the way till he has heard all about the strangers, or he is actually out in the fields looking after his farms.We once thought that when the headman came in from a visit of inspection, with his spear, bow and arrows, they had been all taken up for the occasion, and that he had all the while been hidden in some hut slily watching till he heard that the strangers might be trusted; but on listening to the details given by these men of the appearances of the crops at different parts, and the astonishing minuteness of the speakers' topography, we were persuaded that in some cases we were wrong, and felt rather humiliated.Every knoll, hill, mountain, and every peak on a range has a name; and so has every watercourse, dell, and plain.In fact, every feature and portion of the country is so minutely distinguished by appropriate names, that it would take a lifetime to decipher their meaning.It is not the want, but the superabundance of names that misleads travellers, and the terms used are so multifarious that good scholars will at times scarcely know more than the subject of conversation.

Though it is a little apart from the topic of the attention which the headmen pay to agriculture, yet it may be here mentioned, while speaking of the fulness of the language, that we have heard about a score of words to indicate different varieties of gait--one walks leaning forward, or backward, swaying from side to side, loungingly, or smartly, swaggeringly, swinging the arms, or only one arm, head down or up, or otherwise; each of these modes of walking was expressed by a particular verb; and more words were used to designate the different varieties of fools than we ever tried to count.

Mr. Moffat has translated the whole Bible into the language of the Bechuana, and has diligently studied this tongue for the last forty-four-years; and, though knowing far more of the language than any of the natives who have been reared on the Mission-station of Kuruman, he does not pretend to have mastered it fully even yet.However copious it may be in terms of which we do not feel the necessity, it is poor in others, as in abstract terms, and words used to describe mental operations.

Our third day's march ended in the afternoon of the 27th September, 1863, at the village of Chinanga on the banks of a branch of the Loangwa.A large, rounded mass of granite, a thousand feet high, called Nombe rume, stand on the plain a few miles off.It is quite remarkable, because it has so little vegetation on it.Several other granitic hills stand near it, ornamented with trees, like most heights of this country, and a heap of blue mountains appears away in the north.

The effect of the piercing winds upon the men had never been got rid of.Several had been unable to carry a load ever since we ascended to the highlands; we had lost one, and another poor lad was so ill as to cause us great anxiety.By waiting in this village, which was so old that it was full of vermin, all became worse.Our European food was entirely expended, and native meal, though finely ground, has so many sharp angular particles in it, that it brought back dysentery, from which we had suffered so much in May.We could scarcely obtain food for the men.The headman of this village of Chinanga was off in a foray against some people further north to supply slaves to the traders expected along the slave route we had just left; and was said, after having expelled the inhabitants, to be living in their stockade, and devouring their corn.The conquered tribe had purchased what was called a peace by presenting the conqueror with three women.