Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,077 pages of information about Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,077 pages of information about Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.

We can see from this hill five distinct ranges, of which Bolengo is the most westerly, and Komanga is the most easterly.  The second is named Sekonkamena, and the third Funze.  Very many conical hills appear among them, and they are generally covered with trees.  On their tops we have beautiful white quartz rocks, and some have a capping of dolomite.  On the west of the second range we have great masses of kyanite or disthene, and on the flanks of the third and fourth a great deal of specular iron ore which is magnetic, and containing a very large percentage of the metal.  The sides of these ranges are generally very precipitous, and there are rivulets between which are not perennial.  Many of the hills have been raised by granite, exactly like that of the Kalomo.  Dikes of this granite may be seen thrusting up immense masses of mica schist and quartz or sandstone schist, and making the strata fold over them on each side, as clothes hung upon a line.  The uppermost stratum is always dolomite or bright white quartz.  Semalembue intended that we should go a little to the northeast, and pass through the people called Babimpe, and we saw some of that people, who invited us to come that way on account of its being smoother; but, feeling anxious to get back to the Zambesi again, we decided to cross the hills toward its confluence with the Kafue.  The distance, which in a straight line is but small, occupied three days.  The precipitous nature of the sides of this mass of hills knocked up the oxen and forced us to slaughter two, one of which, a very large one, and ornamented with upward of thirty pieces of its own skin detached and hanging down, Sekeletu had wished us to take to the white people as a specimen of his cattle.  We saw many elephants among the hills, and my men ran off and killed three.  When we came to the top of the outer range of the hills we had a glorious view.  At a short distance below us we saw the Kafue, wending away over a forest-clad plain to the confluence, and on the other side of the Zambesi, beyond that, lay a long range of dark hills.  A line of fleecy clouds appeared lying along the course of that river at their base.  The plain below us, at the left of the Kafue, had more large game on it than any where else I had seen in Africa.  Hundreds of buffaloes and zebras grazed on the open spaces, and there stood lordly elephants feeding majestically, nothing moving apparently but the proboscis.  I wished that I had been able to take a photograph of a scene so seldom beheld, and which is destined, as guns increase, to pass away from earth.  When we descended we found all the animals remarkably tame.  The elephants stood beneath the trees, fanning themselves with their large ears, as if they did not see us at 200 or 300 yards distance.  The number of animals was quite astonishing, and made me think that here I could realize an image of that time when Megatheria fed undisturbed in the primeval forests.  We saw great numbers of red-colored pigs (’Potamochoerus’)

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Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.