I have mentioned that this part of the country is irrigated by numerous affluents of the Zambezi, which in a course of fifteen to seventy miles receive many smaller tributaries from the right and left, most of which contain the purest flowing water throughout the year. There is so much beauty, united with wild grace, on the upper courses of these rivulets, that if one could imagine the gigantic Boabab trees, to represent our beech and oak, and in the mind see them overshadowing the translucid waters (they generally grow on declivities and elevations), it would carry one back to the margins of those murmuring crystal brooks, such as we meet in our own northern Continent, although the luxuriant vegetation, hidden beneath the fluid mirror of these African brooks, charms still more the mind and eyes. I have alluded to them in my several publications on “Hunting Elephants on Foot in the Tsetse District,” where I described those hunting scenes to have taken place in this hilly country. Shall I continue my theme in a general description, as I have done until now, or shall I devote special attention to the fluvial element, and bring it before the mind of the reader as it presented itself before me, as it revived so often my drooping spirits, borne down by the weight of care and hardships, and made me almost happy when I could impart new life to my weary eyes, by gazing into the calm, clear flood?
Let us imagine ourselves in one of those lovely valleys. Follow me cautiously, dear reader, through the high grass, that we may reach the edge of yonder lakelet, and prostrate ourselves on the soft grass of its bank without disturbing its gay inhabitants, obserying as closely as possible the strange, yet interesting, realm beneath its placid surface.
At either side and before us, slender reeds overtop the glassy surface. They appear broader under the water, and form groups, as it were, of long, green, annulated columns, here and there in close concrescence, in other places scattered like the remains of a verdant column forest. Between these we see dense dark-green, or rare semi-transparent grottoes and caves, real passages, sometimes cloudy layers produced by a tender substance, rising from the bottom of the lakelet. It is the delicate green texture of the spreading Alga. To the left the slight web of this cryptogamous plant decorates the edge of the bank as far as the place where the water flows away into a amall stream, full of the above-mentioned grottoes, caves, and passages, while it forms a kind of ruin, overgrown with moss, to our right.
From the yellowish sandy bottom of the brook, rises the dark-green Alga texture, dense, broad, and in the form of a round hillock, from which project two unequal, straight, cylindrical towers, consisting of the same tender structure, which are connected in the
