We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path:  a group of mon stood about a hundred yards off on one side, and another of women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer.

27th June, 1866.—­To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin.  One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.  We crossed the Tulosi, a stream coming from south, about twenty yards wide.

At Chenjewala’s the people are usually much startled when I explain that the numbers of slaves we see dead on the road have been killed partly by those who sold them, for I tell them that if they sell their fellows, they are like the man who holds the victim while the Arab performs the murder.

Chenjewala blamed Machemba, a chief above him on the Rovuma, for encouraging the slave-trade; I told him I had travelled so much among them that I knew all the excuses they could make, each headman blamed some one else.

“It would be better if you kept your people and cultivated more largely,” said I, “Oh, Machemba sends his men and robs our gardens after we have cultivated,” was the reply.  One man said that the Arabs who come and tempt them with fine clothes are the cause of their selling:  this was childish, so I told them they would very soon have none to sell:  their country was becoming jungle, and all their people who did not die in the road would be making gardens for Arabs at Kilwa and elsewhere.

28th June, 1866.—­When we got about an hour from Chenjewala’s we came to a party in the act of marauding; the owners of the gardens made off for the other side of the river, and waved to us to go against the people of Machemba, but we stood on a knoll with all our goods on the ground, and waited to see how matters would turn out.  Two of the marauders came to us and said they had captured five people.  I suppose they took us for Arabs, as they addressed Musa.  They then took some green maize, and so did some of my people, believing that as all was going, they who were really starving might as well have a share.

I went on a little way with the two marauders, and by the footprints thought the whole party might amount to four or five with guns; the gardens and huts were all deserted.  A poor woman was sitting, cooking green maize, and one of the men ordered her to follow him.  I said to him, “Let her alone, she is dying.”  “Yes,” said he, “of hunger,” and went’on without her.

We passed village after village, and gardens all deserted!  We were now between two contending parties.  We slept at one garden; and as we were told by Chenjewala’s people to take what we liked, and my men had no food, we gleaned what congo beans, bean leaves, and sorghum stalks we could,—­poor fare enough, but all we could get.