The country is furnished largely with forest, having occasionally open lawns covered with grass, not in tufts as in the south, but so closely planted that one can not see the soil.  We came upon a man and his two wives and children, burning coarse rushes and the stalks of tsitla, growing in a brackish marsh, in order to extract a kind of salt from the ashes.  They make a funnel of branches of trees, and line it with grass rope, twisted round until it is, as it were, a beehive-roof inverted.  The ashes are put into water, in a calabash, and then it is allowed to percolate through the small hole in the bottom and through the grass.  When this water is evaporated in the sun, it yields sufficient salt to form a relish with food.  The women and children fled with precipitation, but we sat down at a distance, and allowed the man time to gain courage enough to speak.  He, however, trembled excessively at the apparition before him; but when we explained that our object was to hunt game, and not men, he became calm, and called back his wives.  We soon afterward came to another party on the same errand with ourselves.  The man had a bow about six feet long, and iron-headed arrows about thirty inches in length; he had also wooden arrows neatly barbed, to shoot in cases where he might not be quite certain of recovering them again.  We soon afterward got a zebra, and gave our hunting acquaintances such a liberal share that we soon became friends.  All whom we saw that day then came with us to the encampment to beg a little meat; and as they have so little salt, I have no doubt they felt grateful for what we gave.

Sekelenke and his people, twenty-four in number, defiled past our camp carrying large bundles of dried elephants’ meat.  Most of them came to say good-by, and Sekelenke himself sent to say that he had gone to visit a wife living in the village of Manenko.  It was a mere African manoeuvre to gain information, and not commit himself to either one line of action or another with respect to our visit.  As he was probably in the party before us, I replied that it was all right, and when my people came up from Masiko I would go to my wife too.  Another zebra came to our camp, and, as we had friends near, it was shot.  It was the ‘Equus montanus’, though the country is perfectly flat, and was finely marked down to the feet, as all the zebras are in these parts.

To our first message, offering a visit of explanation to Manenko, we got an answer, with a basket of manioc roots, that we must remain where we were till she should visit us.  Having waited two days already for her, other messengers arrived with orders for me to come to her.  After four days of rains and negotiation, I declined going at all, and proceeded up the river to the small stream Makondo (lat. 13d 23’ 12” S.), which enters the Leeba from the east, and is between twenty and thirty yards broad.

January 1st, 1854.  We had heavy rains almost every day; indeed, the rainy season had fairly set in.  Baskets of the purple fruit called mawa were frequently brought to us by the villagers; not for sale, but from a belief that their chiefs would be pleased to hear that they had treated us well; we gave them pieces of meat in return.