20Th November.  Sekeletu and his large party having conveyed me thus far, and furnished me with a company of 114 men to carry the tusks to the coast, we bade adieu to the Makololo, and proceeded northward to the Lekone.  The country around is very beautiful, and was once well peopled with Batoka, who possessed enormous herds of cattle.  When Sebituane came in former times, with his small but warlike party of Makololo, to this spot, a general rising took place of the Batoka through the whole country, in order to “eat him up”; but his usual success followed him, and, dispersing them, the Makololo obtained so many cattle that they could not take any note of the herds of sheep and goats.  The tsetse has been brought by buffaloes into some districts where formerly cattle abounded.  This obliged us to travel the first few stages by night.  We could not well detect the nature of the country in the dim moonlight; the path, however, seemed to lead along the high bank of what may have been the ancient bed of the Zambesi before the fissure was made.  The Lekone now winds in it in an opposite direction to that in which the ancient river must have flowed.

Both the Lekone and Unguesi flow back toward the centre of the country, and in an opposite direction to that of the main stream.  It was plain, then, that we were ascending the farther we went eastward.  The level of the lower portion of the Lekone is about two hundred feet above that of the Zambesi at the falls, and considerably more than the altitude of Linyanti; consequently, when the river flowed along this ancient bed instead of through the rent, the whole country between this and the ridge beyond Libebe westward, Lake Ngami and the Zouga southward, and eastward beyond Nchokotsa, was one large fresh-water lake.  There is abundant evidence of the existence and extent of this vast lake in the longitudes indicated, and stretching from 17 Deg. to 21 Deg. south latitude.  The whole of this space is paved with a bed of tufa, more or less soft, according as it is covered with soil, or left exposed to atmospheric influences.  Wherever ant-eaters make deep holes in this ancient bottom, fresh-water shells are thrown out, identical with those now existing in the Lake Ngami and the Zambesi.  The Barotse valley was another lake of a similar nature; and one existed beyond Masiko, and a fourth near the Orange River.  The whole of these lakes were let out by means of cracks or fissures made in the subtending sides by the upheaval of the country.  The fissure made at the Victoria Falls let out the water of this great valley, and left a small patch in what was probably its deepest portion, and is now called Lake Ngami.  The Falls of Gonye furnished an outlet to the lake of the Barotse valley, and so of the other great lakes of remote times.  The Congo also finds its way to the sea through a narrow fissure, and so does the Orange River in the west; while other rents made in the eastern ridge, as the Victoria Falls and those to the east