These were all decaying from the effects of the sun and weather; but a few, which had enjoyed the shade, were in a pretty good condition.  I felt inclined to take a specimen of the tusks of the hippopotami, as they were the largest I had ever seen, but feared that the people would look upon me as a “resurrectionist” if I did, and regard any unfavorable event which might afterward occur as a punishment for the sacrilege.  The Batoka believe that Sekote had a pot of medicine buried here, which, when opened, would cause an epidemic in the country.  These tyrants acted much on the fears of their people.

As this was the point from which we intended to strike off to the northeast, I resolved on the following day to visit the falls of Victoria, called by the natives Mosioatunya, or more anciently Shongwe.  Of these we had often heard since we came into the country; indeed, one of the questions asked by Sebituane was, “Have you smoke that sounds in your country?” They did not go near enough to examine them, but, viewing them with awe at a distance, said, in reference to the vapor and noise, “Mosi oa tunya” (smoke does sound there).  It was previously called Shongwe, the meaning of which I could not ascertain.  The word for a “pot” resembles this, and it may mean a seething caldron, but I am not certain of it.  Being persuaded that Mr. Oswell and myself were the very first Europeans who ever visited the Zambesi in the centre of the country, and that this is the connecting link between the known and unknown portions of that river, I decided to use the same liberty as the Makololo did, and gave the only English name I have affixed to any part of the country.  No better proof of previous ignorance of this river could be desired than that an untraveled gentleman, who had spent a great part of his life in the study of the geography of Africa, and knew every thing written on the subject from the time of Ptolemy downward, actually asserted in the “Athenaeum”, while I was coming up the Red Sea, that this magnificent river, the Leeambye, had “no connection with the Zambesi, but flowed under the Kalahari Desert, and became lost;” and “that, as all the old maps asserted, the Zambesi took its rise in the very hills to which we have now come.”  This modest assertion smacks exactly as if a native of Timbuctoo should declare that the “Thames” and the “Pool” were different rivers, he having seen neither the one nor the other.  Leeambye and Zambesi mean the very same thing, viz., the river.

Sekeletu intended to accompany me, but, one canoe only having come instead of the two he had ordered, he resigned it to me.  After twenty minutes’ sail from Kalai we came in sight, for the first time, of the columns of vapor appropriately called “smoke”, rising at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in Africa.  Five columns now arose, and, bending in the direction of the wind, they seemed placed against a low ridge