Leaving Katema’s town on the 19th, and proceeding four miles to the eastward, we forded the southern branch of Lake Dilolo.  We found it a mile and a quarter broad; and, as it flows into the Lotembwa, the lake would seem to be a drain of the surrounding flats, and to partake of the character of a fountain.  The ford was waist-deep, and very difficult, from the masses of arum and rushes through which we waded.  Going to the eastward about three miles, we came to the Southern Lotembwa itself, running in a valley two miles broad.  It is here eighty or ninety yards wide, and contains numerous islands covered with dense sylvan vegetation.  In the rainy season the valley is flooded, and as the waters dry up great multitudes of fish are caught.  This happens very extensively over the country, and fishing-weirs are met with every where.  A species of small fish, about the size of the minnow, is caught in bagfuls and dried in the sun.  The taste is a pungent aromatic bitter, and it was partaken of freely by my people, although they had never met with it before.  On many of the paths which had been flooded a nasty sort of slime of decayed vegetable matter is left behind, and much sickness prevails during the drying up of the water.  We did not find our friend Mozinkwa at his pleasant home on the Lokaloeje; his wife was dead, and he had removed elsewhere.  He followed us some distance, but our reappearance seemed to stir up his sorrows.  We found the pontoon at the village in which we left it.  It had been carefully preserved, but a mouse had eaten a hole in it and rendered it useless.

We traversed the extended plain on the north bank of the Leeba, and crossed this river a little farther on at Kanyonke’s village, which is about twenty miles west of the Peri hills, our former ford.  The first stage beyond the Leeba was at the rivulet Loamba, by the village of Chebende, nephew of Shinte; and next day we met Chebende himself returning from the funeral of Samoana, his father.  He was thin and haggard-looking compared to what he had been before, the probable effect of the orgies in which he had been engaged.  Pitsane and Mohorisi, having concocted the project of a Makololo village on the banks of the Leeba, as an approach to the white man’s market, spoke to Chebende, as an influential man, on the subject, but he cautiously avoided expressing an opinion.  The idea which had sprung up in their own minds of an establishment somewhere near the confluence of the Leeba and Leeambye, commended itself to my judgment at the time as a geographically suitable point for civilization and commerce.  The right bank of the Leeba there is never flooded; and from that point there is communication by means of canoes to the country of the Kanyika, and also to Cazembe and beyond, with but one or two large waterfalls between.  There is no obstruction down to the Barotse valley; and there is probably canoe navigation down the Kafue or Bashukulompo River, though it is reported to contain many cataracts.  It flows through a fertile country, well peopled with Bamasasa, who cultivate the native produce largely.