29Th.  I was most sincerely thankful to find myself on the south bank of the Zambesi, and, having nothing else, I sent back one of my two spoons and a shirt as a thank-offering to Mpende.  The different head men along this river act very much in concert, and if one refuses passage they all do, uttering the sage remark, “If so-and-so did not lend his canoes, he must have had some good reason.”  The next island we came to was that of a man named Mozinkwa.  Here we were detained some days by continuous rains, and thought we observed the confirmation of the Bakwain theory of rains.  A double tier of clouds floated quickly away to the west, and as soon as they began to come in an opposite direction the rains poured down.  The inhabitants who live in a dry region like that of Kolobeng are nearly all as weather-wise as the rain-makers, and any one living among them for any length of time becomes as much interested in the motions of the clouds as they are themselves.  Mr. Moffat, who was as sorely tried by droughts as we were, and had his attention directed in the same way, has noted the curious phenomenon of thunder without clouds.  Mrs. L. heard it once, but I never had that good fortune.  It is worth the attention of the observant.  Humboldt has seen rain without clouds, a phenomenon quite as singular.  I have been in the vicinity of the fall of three aerolites, none of which I could afterward discover.  One fell into the lake Kumadau with a report somewhat like a sharp peal of thunder.  The women of the Bakurutse villages there all uttered a scream on hearing it.  This happened at midday, and so did another at what is called the Great Chuai, which was visible in its descent, and was also accompanied with a thundering noise.  The third fell near Kuruman, and at night, and was seen as a falling star by people at Motito and at Daniel’s Kuil, places distant forty miles on opposite sides of the spot.  It sounded to me like the report of a great gun, and a few seconds after, a lesser sound, as if striking the earth after a rebound.  Does the passage of a few such aerolites through the atmosphere to the earth by day cause thunder without clouds?

We were detained here so long that my tent became again quite rotten.  One of my men, after long sickness, which I did not understand, died here.  He was one of the Batoka, and when unable to walk I had some difficulty in making his companions carry him.  They wished to leave him to die when his case became hopeless.  Another of them deserted to Mozinkwa.  He said that his motive for doing so was that the Makololo had killed both his father and mother, and, as he had neither wife nor child, there was no reason why he should continue longer with them.  I did not object to his statements, but said if he should change his mind he would be welcome to rejoin us, and intimated to Mozinkwa that he must not be sold as a slave.  We are now among people inured to slave-dealing.  We were visited by men who had been as far as Tete or Nyungwe, and were told