other tribes; and that here that ceremony is unknown.  The custom is so universal that a person who has his teeth is considered ugly, and occasionally, when the Batoka borrowed my looking-glass, the disparaging remark would be made respecting boys or girls who still retained their teeth, “Look at the great teeth!” Some of the Makololo give a more facetious explanation of the custom:  they say that the wife of a chief having in a quarrel bitten her husband’s hand, he, in revenge, ordered her front teeth to be knocked out, and all the men in the tribe followed his example; but this does not explain why they afterward knocked out their own.

The Batoka of the Zambesi are generally very dark in color, and very degraded and negro-like in appearance, while those who live on the high lands we are now ascending are frequently of the color of coffee and milk.  We had a large number of the Batoka of Mokwine in our party, sent by Sekeletu to carry his tusks.  Their greater degradation was probably caused by the treatment of their chiefs—­the barbarians of the islands.  I found them more difficult to manage than any of the rest of my companions, being much less reasonable and impressible than the others.  My party consisted of the head men aforementioned, Sekwebu, and Kanyata.  We were joined at the falls by another head man of the Makololo, named Monahin, in command of the Batoka.  We had also some of the Banajoa under Mosisinyane, and, last of all, a small party of Bashubia and Barotse under Tuba Mokoro, which had been furnished by Sekeletu because of their ability to swim.  They carried their paddles with them, and, as the Makololo suggested, were able to swim over the rivers by night and steal canoes, if the inhabitants should be so unreasonable as to refuse to lend them.  These different parties assorted together into messes; any orders were given through their head man, and when food was obtained he distributed it to the mess.  Each party knew its own spot in the encampment; and as this was always placed so that our backs should be to the east, the direction from whence the prevailing winds came, no time was lost in fixing the sheds of our encampment.  They each took it in turn to pull grass to make my bed, so I lay luxuriously.

November 26th.  As the oxen could only move at night, in consequence of a fear that the buffaloes in this quarter might have introduced the tsetse, I usually performed the march by day on foot, while some of the men brought on the oxen by night.  On coming to the villages under Marimba, an old man, we crossed the Unguesi, a rivulet which, like the Lekone, runs backward.  It falls into the Leeambye a little above the commencement of the rapids.  The stratified gneiss, which is the underlying rock of much of this part of the country, dips toward the centre of the continent, but the strata are often so much elevated as to appear nearly on their edges.  Rocks of augitic trap are found in various positions on it; the general strike is north and south; but when the gneiss was first seen, near to the basalt of the falls, it was easterly and westerly, and the dip toward the north, as if the eruptive force of the basalt had placed it in that position.