When we had got fairly away from the villages, the guides from Kangenke sat down and told us that there were three paths in front, and, if we did not at once present them with a cloth, they would leave us to take whichever we might like best.  As I had pointed out the direction in which Loanda lay, and had only employed them for the sake of knowing the paths between villages which lay along our route, and always objected when they led us in any other than the Loanda direction, I wished my men now to go on without the guides, trusting to ourselves to choose the path which would seem to lead us in the direction we had always followed.  But Mashauana, fearing lest we might wander, asked leave to give his own cloth, and when the guides saw that, they came forward shouting “Averie, Averie!”

In the afternoon of this day we came to a valley about a mile wide, filled with clear, fast-flowing water.  The men on foot were chin deep in crossing, and we three on ox-back got wet to the middle, the weight of the animals preventing them from swimming.  A thunder-shower descending completed the partial drenching of the plain, and gave a cold, uncomfortable “packing in a wet blanket” that night.  Next day we found another flooded valley about half a mile wide, with a small and now deep rivulet in its middle, flowing rapidly to the S.S.E., or toward the Kasai.  The middle part of this flood, being the bed of what at other times is the rivulet, was so rapid that we crossed by holding on to the oxen, and the current soon dashed them to the opposite bank; we then jumped off, and, the oxen being relieved of their burdens, we could pull them on to the shallower part.  The rest of the valley was thigh deep and boggy, but holding on by the belt which fastened the blanket to the ox, we each floundered through the nasty slough as well as we could.  These boggy parts, lying parallel to the stream, were the most extensive we had come to:  those mentioned already were mere circumscribed patches; these extended for miles along each bank; but even here, though the rapidity of the current was very considerable, the thick sward of grass was “laid” flat along the sides of the stream, and the soil was not abraded so much as to discolor the flood.  When we came to the opposite side of this valley, some pieces of the ferruginous conglomerate, which forms the capping to all other rocks in a large district around and north of this, cropped out, and the oxen bit at them as if surprised by the appearance of stone as much as we were; or it may have contained some mineral of which they stood in need.  We had not met with a stone since leaving Shinte’s.  The country is covered with deep alluvial soil of a dark color and very fertile.