The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death Volume I Part 7

CHAPTER IV.

Geology and description of the Waiyau land. Leaves Mataka's. The Nyumbo plant. Native iron-foundry. Blacksmiths. Makes for the Lake Nya.s.sa. Delight at seeing the Lake once more. The Manganja or Nya.s.sa tribe. Arab slave crossing. Unable to procure pa.s.sage across. The Kungu fly. Fear of the English amongst slavers. Lake sh.o.r.e. Blue ink. Chitane changes colour. The Nsaka fish.

Makalaose drinks beer. The Sanjika fish. London antiquities.

Lake rivers. Mukate's. Lake Pamalombe. Mponda's. A slave gang.

Wikatani discovers his relatives and remains.

_28th July, 1866._--We proposed to start to-day, but Mataka said that he was not ready yet: the flour had to be ground, and he had given us no meat. He had sent plenty of cooked food almost every day. He asked if we would slaughter the ox he would give here, or take it on; we preferred to kill it at once. He came on the 28th with a good lot of flour for us, and men to guide us to Nya.s.sa, telling us that this was Moembe, and his district extended all the way to the Lake: he would not send us to Losewa, as that place had lately been plundered and burned.

In general the chiefs have shown an anxiety to promote our safety. The country is a ma.s.s of mountains. On leaving Mataka's we ascended considerably, and about the end of the first day's march, near Magola's village, the barometer showed our greatest alt.i.tude, about 3400 feet above the sea. There were villages of these mountaineers everywhere, for the most part of 100 houses or more each. The springs were made the most use of that they knew; the damp spots drained, and the water given a free channel for use in irrigation further down: most of these springs showed the presence of iron by the oxide oozing out. A great many patches of peas are seen in full bearing and flower.

The trees are small, except in the hollows: there is plenty of gra.s.s and flowers near streams and on the heights. The mountain-tops may rise 2000 or 3000 feet above their flanks, along which we wind, going perpetually up and down the steep ridges of which the country is but a succession.

Looking at the geology of the district, the plateaux on each side of the Rovuma are ma.s.ses of grey sandstone, capped with ma.s.ses of ferruginous conglomerate; apparently an aqueous deposit. When we ascend the Rovuma about sixty miles, a great many pieces and blocks of silicified wood appear on the surface of the soil at the bottom of the slope up the plateaux. This in Africa is a sure indication of the presence of coal beneath, but it was not observed cropping out; the plateaux are cut up in various directions by wadys well supplied with gra.s.s and trees on deep and somewhat sandy soil: but at the confluence of the Loendi highlands they appear in the far distance. In the sands of the Loendi pieces of coal are quite common.[16]

Before reaching the confluence of the Rovuma and Loendi, or say about ninety miles from the sea, the plateau is succeeded by a more level country, having detached granitic ma.s.ses shooting up some 500 or 700 feet. The sandstone of the plateau has at first been hardened, then quite metamorphosed into a chocolate-coloured schist. As at Chilole hill, we have igneous rocks, apparently trap, capped with ma.s.ses of beautiful white dolomite. We still ascend in alt.i.tude as we go westwards, and come upon long tracts of gneiss with hornblende. The gneiss is often striated, all the striae looking one way--sometimes north and south, and at other times east and west. These rocks look as if a stratified rock had been nearly melted, and the strata fused together by the heat. From these striated rocks have shot up great rounded ma.s.ses of granite or syenite, whose smooth sides and crowns contain scarcely any trees, and are probably from 3000 to 4000 feet above the sea. The elevated plains among these mountain ma.s.ses show great patches of ferruginous conglomerate, which, when broken, look like yellow haemat.i.te with madrepore holes in it: this has made the soil of a red colour.

On the watershed we have still the rounded granitic hills jutting above the plains (if such they may be called) which are all ups and downs, and furrowed with innumerable running rills, the sources of the Rovuma and Loendi. The highest rock observed with mica schist was at an alt.i.tude of 3440 feet. The same uneven country prevails as we proceed from the watershed about forty miles down to the Lake, and a great deal of quartz in small fragments renders travelling-very difficult. Near the Lake, and along its eastern sh.o.r.e, we have mica schist and gneiss foliated, with a great deal of hornblende; but the most remarkable feature of it is that the rocks are all tilted on edge, or slightly inclined to the Lake. The active agent in effecting this is not visible. It looks as if a sudden rent had been made, so as to form the Lake, and tilt all these rocks nearly over. On the east side of the lower part of the Lake we have two ranges of mountains, evidently granitic: the nearer one covered with small trees and lower than the other; the other jagged and bare, or of the granitic forms.

But in all this country no fossil-yielding rock was visible except the grey sandstone referred to at the beginning of this note. The rocks are chiefly the old crystalline forms.

One fine straight tall tree in the hollows seemed a species of fig: its fruit was just forming, but it was too high for me to ascertain its species. The natives don't eat the fruit, but they eat the large grubs which come out of it. The leaves were fifteen inches long by five broad: they call it Unguengo.

_29th July, 1866._--At Magola's village. Although we are now rid of the sepoys, we cannot yet congratulate ourselves on being rid of the lazy habits of lying down in the path which they introduced. A strong scud comes up from the south bringing much moisture with it: it blows so hard above, this may be a storm on the coast. Temperature in mornings 55.

_30th July, 1866._--A short march brought us to Pezimba's village, which consists of 200 houses and huts. It is placed very nicely on a knoll between two burns, which, as usual, are made use of for irrigating peas in winter time. The headman said that if we left now we had a good piece of jungle before us, and would sleep twice in it before reaching Mbanga. We therefore remained. An Arab party, hearing of our approach, took a circuitous route among the mountains to avoid coming in contact with us. In travelling to Pezimba's we had commenced our western descent to the Lake, for we were now lower than Magola's by 300 feet. We crossed many rivulets and the Lochesi, a good-sized stream. The watershed parts some streams for Loendi and some for Rovuma. There is now a decided scantiness of trees. Many of the hill-tops are covered with gra.s.s or another plant; there is pleasure now in seeing them bare. Ferns, rhododendrons, and a foliaged tree, which looks in the distance like silver-fir, are met with.

The Mandare root is here called Nyumbo, when cooked it has a slight degree of bitterness with it which cultivation may remove. Mica schist crowned some of the heights on the watershed, then gneiss, and now, as we descend further, we have igneous rocks of more recent eruption, porphyry and gneiss, with hornblende. A good deal of ferruginous conglomerate, with holes in it, covers many spots; when broken, it looks like yellow haemat.i.te, with black linings to the holes: this is probably the ore used in former times by the smiths, of whose existence we now find still more evidence than further east.

_31st July, 1866._--I had presented Pezimba with a cloth, so he cooked for us handsomely last night, and this morning desired us to wait a little as he had not yet sufficient meal made to present: we waited and got a generous present.

It was decidedly milder here than at Mataka's, and we had a clear sky.

In our morning's march we pa.s.sed the last of the population, and went on through a fine well-watered fruitful country, to sleep near a mountain called Mtewire, by a stream called Msapo. A very large Arab slave-party was close by our encampment, and I wished to speak to them; but as soon as they knew of our being near they set off in a pathless course across country, and were six days in the wilderness.[17]

_1st August, 1866._--We saw the encampment of another Arab party. It consisted of ten pens, each of which, from the number of fires it contained, may have held from eighty to a hundred slaves. The people of the country magnified the numbers, saying that they would reach from this to Mataka's; but from all I can learn, I think that from 300 to 800 slaves is the commoner gang. This second party went across country very early this morning. We saw the fire-sticks which the slaves had borne with them. The fear they feel is altogether the effect of the English name, for we have done nothing to cause their alarm.

_2nd August, 1866._--There was something very cheering to me in the sight at our encampment of yellow gra.s.s and trees dotted over it, as in the Bechuana country. The birds were singing merrily too, inspired by the cold, which was 47, and by the vicinity of some population.

Gum-copal trees and bushes grow here as well as all over the country; but gum is never dug for, probably because the trees were never large enough to yield the fossil gum. Marks of smiths are very abundant and some furnaces are still standing. Much cultivation must formerly have been where now all is jungle.

We arrived at Mbanga, a village embowered in trees, chiefly of the euphorbia, so common in the Manganja country further south. Kandulo, the headman, had gone to drink beer at another village, but sent orders to give a hut and to cook for us. We remained next day. Took lunars.

We had now pa.s.sed through, at the narrowest part, the hundred miles of depopulated country, of which about seventy are on the N.E. of Mataka.

The native accounts differ as to the cause. Some say slave wars, and a.s.sert that the Makoa from the vicinity of Mozambique played an important part in them; others say famine; others that the people have moved to and beyond Nya.s.sa.[18] Certain it is, from the potsherds strewed over the country, and the still remaining ridges on which beans, sorghum, maize, and ca.s.sava, were planted, that the departed population was prodigious. The Waiyau, who are now in the country, came from the other side of the Rovuma, and they probably supplanted the Manganja, an operation which we see going on at the present day.

_4th August, 1866._--An hour and a half brought us to Miule, a village on the same level with Mbanga; and the chief pressing us to stay, on the plea of our sleeping two nights in the jungle, instead of one if we left early next morning, we consented. I asked him what had become of the very large iron-smelting population of this region; he said many had died of famine, others had fled to the west of Nya.s.sa: the famine is the usual effect of slave wars, and much death is thereby caused--probably much more than by the journey to the coast. He had never heard any tradition of stone hatchets having been used, nor of stone spear-heads or arrowheads of that material, nor had he heard of any being turned up by the women in hoeing. The Makonde, as we saw, use wooden spears where iron is scarce. I saw wooden hoes used for tilling the soil in the Bechuana and Bataka countries, but never stone ones. In 1841 I saw a Bushwoman in the Cape Colony with a round stone and a hole through it; on being asked she showed me how it was used by inserting the top of a digging-stick into it, and digging a root. The stone was to give the stick weight.

[Ill.u.s.tration.]

The stones still used as anvils and sledge-hammers by many of the African smiths, when considered from their point of view, show sounder sense than if they were burdened with the great weights we use. They are unacquainted with the process of case-hardening, which, applied to certain parts of our anvils, gives them their usefulness, and an anvil of their soft iron would not do so well as a hard stone. It is true a small light one might be made, but let any one see how the hammers of their iron bevel over and round in the faces with a little work, and he will perceive that only a wild freak would induce any sensible native smith to make a ma.s.s equal to a sledge-hammer, and burden himself with a weight for what can be better performed by a stone. If people are settled, as on the coast, then they gladly use any ma.s.s of cast iron they may find, but never where, as in the interior, they have no certainty of remaining any length of time in one spot.

_5th August, 1866._--We left Miule, and commenced our march towards Lake Nya.s.sa, and slept at the last of the streams that flow to the Loendi. In Mataka's vicinity, N.E., there is a perfect brush of streams flowing to that river: one forms a lake in its course, and the sources of the Rovuma lie in the same region. After leaving Mataka's we crossed a good-sized one flowing to Loendi, and, the day after leaving Pezimba's, another going to the Chiringa or Lochiringa, which is a tributary of the Rovuma.

_6th August, 1866._--We pa.s.sed two cairns this morning at the beginning of the very sensible descent to the Lake. They are very common in all this Southern Africa in the pa.s.ses of the mountains, and are meant to mark divisions of countries, perhaps burial-places, but the Waiyau who accompanied us thought that they were merely heaps of stone collected by some one making a garden. The cairns were placed just about the spot where the blue waters of Nya.s.sa first came fairly into view.

We now came upon a stream, the Misinje, flowing into the Lake, and we crossed it five times; it was about twenty yards wide, and thigh deep.

We made but short stages when we got on the lower plateau, for the people had great abundance of food, and gave large presents of it if we rested. One man gave four fowls, three large baskets of maize, pumpkins, eland's fat--a fine male, as seen by his horns,--and pressed us to stay, that he might see our curiosities as well as others. He said that at one day's distance south of him all sorts of animals, as buffaloes, elands, elephants, hippopotami, and antelopes, could be shot.

_8th August, 1866._--We came to the Lake at the confluence of the Misinje, and felt grateful to That Hand which had protected us thus far on our journey. It was as if I had come back to an old home I never expected again to see; and pleasant to bathe in the delicious waters again, hear the roar of the sea, and dash in the rollers. Temp.

71 at 8 A.M., while the air was 65. I feel quite exhilarated.

The headman here, Mokalaose, is a real Manganja, and he and all his people exhibit the greater darkness of colour consequent on being in a warm moist climate; he is very friendly, and presented millet, porridge, ca.s.sava, and hippopotamus meat boiled and asked if I liked milk, as he had some of Mataka's cattle here. His people bring sanjika the best Lake fish, for sale; they are dried on stages over slow fires, and lose their fine flavour by it, but they are much prized inland. I bought fifty for a fathom of calico; when fresh, they taste exactly like the best herrings, _i.e._ as we think, but voyagers' and travellers' appet.i.tes are often so whetted as to be incapable of giving a true verdict in matters of taste.

[It is necessary to explain that Livingstone knew of an Arab settlement on the western sh.o.r.e of the Lake, and that he hoped to induce the chief man Jumbe to give him a pa.s.sage to the other side.]

_10th August, 1866._--I sent Seyed Majid's letter up to Jumbe, but the messenger met some coast Arabs at the Loangwa, which may be seven miles from this, and they came back with him, haggling a deal about the fare, and then went off, saying that they would bring the dhow here for us. Finding that they did not come, I sent Musa, who brought back word that they had taken the dhow away over to Jumbe at Kotakota, or, as they p.r.o.nounce it, Ngotagota. Very few of the coast Arabs can read; in words they are very polite, but truthfulness seems very little regarded. I am resting myself and people--working up journal, lunars, and alt.i.tudes--but will either move south or go to the Arabs towards the north soon.

Mokalaose's fears of the Waiyau will make him welcome Jumbe here, and then the Arab will some day have an opportunity of scattering his people as he has done those at Kotakota. He has made Losewa too hot for himself. When the people there were carried off by Mataka's people, Jumbe seized their stores of grain, and now has no post to which he can go there. The Loangwa Arabs give an awful account of Jumbe's murders and selling the people, but one cannot take it all in; at the mildest it must have been bad. This is all they ever do; they cannot form a state or independent kingdom: slavery and the slave-trade are insuperable obstacles to any permanence inland; slaves can escape so easily, all therefore that the Arabs do is to collect as much money as they can by hook and by crook, and then leave the country.

We notice a bird called namtambwe, which sings very nicely with a strong voice after dark here at the Misinje confluence.

_11th August, 1866._--Two headmen came down country from villages where we slept, bringing us food, and asking how we are treated; they advise our going south to Mukate's, where the Lake is narrow.

_12th-14th August, 1866._--Map making; but my energies were sorely taxed by the lazy sepoys, and I was usually quite tired out at night.

Some men have come down from Mataka's, and report the arrival of an Englishman with cattle for me, "he has two eyes behind as well as two in front:" this is enough of news for awhile!

Mokalaose has his little afflictions, and he tells me of them. A wife ran away, I asked how many he had; he told me twenty in all: I then thought he had nineteen too many. He answered with the usual reason, "But who would cook for strangers if I had but one?"

We saw clouds of "kungu" gnats on the Lake; they are not eaten here.

An ungenerous traveller coming here with my statement in his hand, and finding the people denying all knowledge of how to catch and cook them, might say that I had been romancing in saying I had seen them made into cakes in the northern part of the Lake; when asking here about them, a stranger said, "They know how to use them in the north; we do not."

Mokalaose thinks that the Arabs are afraid that I may take their dhows from them and go up to the north. He and the other headmen think that the best way will be to go to Mukate's in the south. All the Arabs flee from me, the English name being in their minds inseparably connected with recapturing slavers: they cannot conceive that I have any other object in view; they cannot read Seyed Majid's letter.

_21st August, 1866._--Started for the Loangwa, on the east side of the Lake; hilly all the way, about seven miles. This river may be twenty yards wide near its confluence; the Misinje is double that: each has acc.u.mulated a promontory of deposit and enters the Lake near its apex.

We got a house from a Waiyau man on a bank about forty feet above the level of Nya.s.sa, but I could not sleep for the manoeuvres of a crowd of the minute ants which infested it. They chirrup distinctly; they would not allow the men to sleep either, though all were pretty tired by the rough road up.

_22nd August, 1866._--We removed to the south side of the Loangwa, where there are none of these little pests.

_23rd August, 1866._--Proposed to the Waiyau headman to send a canoe over to call Jumbe, as I did not believe in the a.s.sertions of the half-caste Arab here that he had sent for his. All the Waiyau had helped me, and why not he? He was pleased with this, but advised waiting till a man sent to Losewa should return.

_24th August, 1866._--A leopard took a dog out of a house next to ours; he had bitten a man before, but not mortally. _29th August, 1866._--News come that the two dhows have come over to Losewa (Losefa). The Mazitu had chased Jumbe up the hills: had they said, on to an island, I might have believed them.

_30th August,1866._--The fear which the English have inspired in the Arab slave-traders is rather inconvenient. All flee from me as if I had the plague, and I cannot in consequence transmit letters to the coast, or get across the Lake. They seem to think that if I get into a dhow I will be sure to burn it. As the two dhows on the Lake are used for nothing else but the slave-trade, their owners have no hope of my allowing them to escape, so after we have listened to various lies as excuses, we resolve to go southwards, and cross at the point of departure of the s.h.i.+re from the Lake. I took lunars several times on both sides of the moon, and have written a despatch for Lord Clarendon, besides a number of private letters.

_3rd September, 1866._--Went down to confluence of the Misinje and came to many of the eatable insect "kungu,"--they are caught by a quick motion of the hand holding a basket. We got a cake of these same insects further down; they make a buzz like a swarm of bees, and are probably the perfect state of some Lake insect.

I observed two beaches of the Lake: one about fifteen feet above the present high-water mark, and the other about forty above that; but between the two the process of disintegration, which results from the sudden cold and heat in these regions, has gone on so much that seldom is a well-rounded smoothed one seen; the lower beach is very well marked.

The strike of large ma.s.ses of foliated gneiss is parallel with the major axis of the Lake, and all are tilted on edge. Some are a little inclined to the Lake, as if dipping to it westwards, but others are as much inclined the opposite way, or twisted.

I made very good blue ink from the juice of a berry, the fruit of a creeper, which is the colour of port wine when expressed. A little ferri carb. ammon., added to this is all that is required.

The poodle dog Chitane is rapidly changing the colour of its hair. All the parts corresponding to the ribs and neck are rapidly becoming red; the majority of country dogs are of this colour.