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VEGETABLE AND MINERAL PRODUCTIONS. CHAP. II.

erally correct, for he trusts not to his dice alone; he has confidential agents all over the village, by whose inquiries and information he is enabled to detect the culprit. Since the introduction of muskets, gun doctors have sprung up, and they sell the medicine which professes to make good marksmen; others are rain doctors, etc., etc. The various schools deal in little charms, which are hung round the purchaser's neck to avert evil: some of them contain the medicine, others increase its power.

Indigo, about three or four feet high, grows in great luxuriance in the streets of Tette, and so does the senna plant. The leaves are undistinguishable from those imported in England. We set the Makololo to collect specimens, but the natives objected to their doing so, though they themselves never make use of them. A small amount of firstrate cotton is cultivated by the native population for the manufacture of a coarse cloth. In former times the Portuguese collected it at a cheap rate, and made use of it instead of the calico now imported, to exchange for the Manica gold dust. A neighboring tribe raises the sugar-cane, and makes a little sugar; but they use most primitive wooden rollers, and having no skill in mixing lime with the extracted juice, the product is of course of very inferior quality. Plenty of magnetic iron ore is found near Tette, and coal also to any amount, a single cliff-seam measuring twenty-five feet in thickness. It was found to burn well in the steamer on the first trial. The ash showed a large quantity of shaly refuse; but, suspecting that this was from the coal near the surface having been exposed to the weather for ages, we drove a shaft of some thirty feet, and the mineral was found to improve the farther we went in. Gold is washed for in of days of Tette. The

the beds of rivers, within a couple

СНАР. ІІ.

KEBRABASA RAPIDS.

59

natives are fully aware of its value, but seldom search for it, and never dig deeper than four or five feet. They dread lest the falling in of the sand of the river's bed should bury them. In former times, when traders went with hundreds of slaves to the washings, the produce was considerable. It is now insignificant. The gold-producing lands have always been in the hands of independent tribes. Deep cuttings near the sources of the gold-yielding streams seem never to have been tried here, as in California and Austra lia, nor has any machinery been used save common wooden basins for washing.

Our curiosity had been so much excited by the reports we heard of the Kebrabasa Rapids, that we resolved to make a short examination of them, and seized the oppor tunity of the Zambesi being unusually low to endeavor to ascertain their character while uncovered by the water. We reached them on the 9th of November. The country between Tette and Panda Mokua, where navigation ends, is well wooded and hilly on both banks. Panda Mokua is a hill two miles below the rapids, capped with dolomite containing copper ore.

Conspicuous among the trees for its gigantic size, and bark colored exactly like Egyptian syenite, is the burly Baobab. It often makes the other trees of the forest look like mere bushes in comparison. A hollow one, already mentioned, is 74 feet in circumference, another was 84, and some have been found on the West Coast which measures 100 feet. Their great size induced some to imagine that they afforded evidence that the flood of Noah never took place. A careful examination of many hundreds in the forests, and of some which have sprung up in the floors of old stone houses, convinces us, from the number of concentric rings,

60

GEOLOGY OF KEBRABASA.

CHAP. II.

that even the very largest specimens of this remarkably soft-wooded tree are not 500 years old. The lofty range of Kebrabasa, consisting chiefly of conical hills, covered with scraggy trees, crosses the Zambesi, and confines it within a narrow, rough, and rocky dell of about a quarter of a mile in breadth; over this, which may be called the flood-bed of the river, large masses of rock are huddled in indescribable confusion. The drawing, for the use of which, and of others, our thanks are due to Lord Russell, conveys but a faint idea of the scene, inasmuch as the hills which confine the river do not appear in the sketch. The chief rock is syenite, some portions of which have a beautiful blue tinge like lapis lazuli diffused through them; others are gray. Blocks of granite also abound, of a pinkish tinge: and these, with metamorphic rocks, contorted, twisted, and thrown into every conceivable position, afford a picture of dislocation or unconformability which would gladden a geological lecturer's heart; but at high flood this rough channel is all smoothed over, and it then conforms well with the river below it, which is half a mile wide. In the dry season the stream runs at the bottom of a narrow and deep groove, whose sides are polished and fluted by the boiling action of the water in flood, like the rims of ancient Eastern wells by the draw-ropes. The breadth of the groove is often not more than forty to sixty yards, and it has some sharp turnings, double channels, and little cataracts in it. As we steamed up, the masts of the "Ma Robert," though some thirty feet high, did not reach the level of the flooded channel above, and the man in the chains sung out, “No bottom at ten fathoms." Huge pot-holes, as large as drawwells, had been worn in the sides, and were so deep that in some instances, when protected from the sun by overhang