who is the thief:  he is generally 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.  A small amount of first-rate cotton is cultivated by the native population for the manufacture of a coarse cloth.  A neighbouring 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.  Gold is washed for in the beds of rivers, within a couple of days of Tette.  The 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 Australia, nor has any machinery been used save common wooden basins for washing.

CHAPTER II.

Kebrabasa Rapids—­Tette—­African fever—­Exploration of the
Shire—­Discovery of Lake Shirwa.

Our curiosity had been so much excited by the reports we had heard of the Kebrabasa rapids, that we resolved to make a short examination of them, and seized the opportunity of the Zambesi being unusually low, to endeavour 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.