we ordered them either to lay down their weapons or be off.  Next day we passed through a piece of forest so dense that no one could have penetrated it without an axe.  It was flooded, not by the river, but by the heavy rains which poured down every day, and kept those who had clothing constantly wet.  I observed, in this piece of forest, a very strong smell of sulphureted hydrogen.  This I had observed repeatedly in other parts before.  I had attacks of fever of the intermittent type again and again, in consequence of repeated drenchings in these unhealthy spots.

On the 11th and 12th we were detained by incessant rains, and so heavy I never saw the like in the south.  I had a little tapioca and a small quantity of Libonta meal, which I still reserved for worse times.  The patience of my men under hunger was admirable; the actual want of the present is never so painful as the thought of getting nothing in the future.  We thought the people of some large hamlets very niggardly and very independent of their chiefs, for they gave us and Manenko nothing, though they had large fields of maize in an eatable state around them.  When she went and kindly begged some for me, they gave her five ears only.  They were subjects of her uncle; and, had they been Makololo, would have been lavish in their gifts to the niece of their chief.  I suspected that they were dependents of some of Shinte’s principal men, and had no power to part with the maize of their masters.

Each house of these hamlets has a palisade of thick stakes around it, and the door is made to resemble the rest of the stockade; the door is never seen open; when the owner wishes to enter, he removes a stake or two, squeezes his body in, then plants them again in their places, so that an enemy coming in the night would find it difficult to discover the entrance.  These palisades seem to indicate a sense of insecurity in regard to their fellow-men, for there are no wild beasts to disturb them; the bows and arrows have been nearly as efficacious in clearing the country here as guns have in the country farther south.  This was a disappointment to us, for we expected a continuance of the abundance of game in the north which we found when we first came up to the confluence of the Leeba and Leeambye.

A species of the silver-tree of the Cape (’Leucodendron argenteum’) is found in abundance in the parts through which we have traveled since leaving Samoana’s.  As it grows at a height of between two and three thousand feet above the level of the sea, on the Cape Table Mountain, and again on the northern slope of the Cashan Mountains, and here at considerably greater heights (four thousand feet), the difference of climate prevents the botanical range being considered as affording a good approximation to the altitude.  The rapid flow of the Leeambye, which once seemed to me evidence of much elevation of the country from which it comes, I now found, by the boiling point of water, was fallacious.*