previously known to exist there at all. The Portuguese maps all represent it as rising far to the east of where we now were. We saw it at the end of the dry season, and yet there was a breadth of from three hundred to six hundred yards of deep flowing water. At the period of its annual inundation it rises twenty feet in perpendicular height, and floods fifteen or twenty miles of lands adjacent to its banks.
The country over which we had travelled from the Chobs was perfectly flat, except where large ant-hills formed mounds a few feet high. These are generally covered with wild date-trees and palmyras, and in some parts there are forests of mimosas and mopane. The tract between the Chobe and Zambesi is occasionally flooded, and there are large patches of swamps lying either near the former or on its banks. The Makololo lived among these swamps for the sake of the protection the deep reedy rivers afforded them against their enemies. There was no suitable place for a settlement. The healthy districts were defenceless, and the safe localities were so deleterious to human life, that the original Basutos had nearly all been cut off by the fever. I therefore feared to subject my family to the scourge.
As we were the first white men the inhabitants had ever seen, we were visited by prodigious numbers. One of our visitors appeared in a gaudy dressing-gown of printed calico; others had garments of printed cotton, and of blue, green, and red baize. These had been purchased, in exchange for boys, from a tribe called Mambari, which is situated near Bihe, and who only began the slave-trade with the Makololo in 1850. They had a number of old Portuguese guns, which Sebituane thought would be most important in any future invasion of Matebele. He offered to buy them with cattle or ivory, but their owners refused everything except boys about fourteen years of age. The desire to possess the guns at length prevailed, and eight were obtained in exchange for as many boys. These were not Makololo children, but captives of the black races they had conquered. I have never known in Africa an instance of a parent selling his own offspring. The Makololo afterwards made a foray, in conjunction with the Mambari, against some tribes to the eastward. The Mambari were to have the captives, and the Makololo were to have the
