being above the confluence, could not avail as a geographical point.  There are some good houses in the stockade.  The trees of which it is composed seemed to me to be living, and could not be burned.  It was strange to see a stockade menacing the whole commerce of the river in a situation where the guns of a vessel would have full play on it, but it is a formidable affair for those who have only muskets.  On one occasion, when Nyaude was attacked by Kisaka, they fought for weeks; and though Nyaude was reduced to cutting up his copper anklets for balls, his enemies were not able to enter the stockade.

On the 24th we sailed only about three hours, as we had done the day before; but having come to a small island at the western entrance of the gorge of Lupata, where Dr. Lacerda is said to have taken an astronomical observation, and called it the island of Mozambique, because it was believed to be in the same latitude, or 15d 1’, I wished to verify his position, and remained over night:  my informants must have been mistaken, for I found the island of Mozambique here to be lat. 16d 34’ 46” S.

Respecting this range, to which the gorge has given a name, some Portuguese writers have stated it to be so high that snow lies on it during the whole year, and that it is composed of marble.  It is not so high in appearance as the Campsie Hills when seen from the Vale of Clyde.  The western side is the most abrupt, and gives the idea of the greatest height, as it rises up perpendicularly from the water six or seven hundred feet.  As seen from this island, it is certainly no higher than Arthur’s Seat appears from Prince’s Street, Edinburgh.  The rock is compact silicious schist of a slightly reddish color, and in thin strata; the island on which we slept looks as if torn off from the opposite side of the gorge, for the strata are twisted and torn in every direction.  The eastern side of the range is much more sloping than the western, covered with trees, and does not give the idea of altitude so much as the western.  It extends a considerable way into the Maganja country in the north, and then bends round toward the river again, and ends in the lofty mountain Morumbala, opposite Senna.  On the other or southern side it is straighter, but is said to end in Gorongozo, a mountain west of the same point.  The person who called this Lupata “the spine of the world” evidently did not mean to say that it was a translation of the word, for it means a defile or gorge having perpendicular walls.  This range does not deserve the name of either Cordillera or Spine, unless we are willing to believe that the world has a very small and very crooked “back-bone”.