was 99.5 degrees, or 1.5 degrees hotter than that of the natives, which stood at 98 degrees.  Our shoes, however, enable us to pass over the hot burning soil better than they can.  Many of those who wear sandals have corns on the sides of the feet, and on the heels, where the straps pass.  We have seen instances, too, where neither sandals nor shoes were worn, of corns on the soles of the feet.  It is, moreover, not at all uncommon to see toes cocked up, as if pressed out of their proper places; at home, we should have unhesitatingly ascribed this to the vicious fashions perversely followed by our shoemakers.

On the 5th, after crossing some hills, we rested at the village of Simariango.  The bellows of the blacksmith here were somewhat different from the common goatskin bags, and more like those seen in Madagascar.  They consisted of two wooden vessels, like a lady’s bandbox of small dimensions, the upper ends of which were covered with leather, and looked something like the heads of drums, except that the leather bagged in the centre.  They were fitted with long nozzles, through which the air was driven by working the loose covering of the tops up and down by means of a small piece of wood attached to their centres.  The blacksmith said that tin was obtained from a people in the north, called Marendi, and that he had made it into bracelets; we had never heard before of tin being found in the country.

Our course then lay down the bed of a rivulet, called Mapatizia, in which there was much calc spar, with calcareous schist, and then the Tette grey sandstone, which usually overlies coal.  On the 6th we arrived at the islet Chilombe, belonging to Sinamane, where the Zambesi runs broad and smooth again, and were well received by Sinamane himself.  Never was Sunday more welcome to the weary than this, the last we were to spend with our convoy.

We now saw many good-looking young men and women.  The dresses of the ladies are identical with those of Nubian women in Upper Egypt.  To a belt on the waist a great number of strings are attached to hang all round the person.  These fringes are about six or eight inches long.  The matrons wear in addition a skin cut like the tails of the coatee formerly worn by our dragoons.  The younger girls wear the waist-belt exhibited in the woodcut, ornamented with shells, and have the fringes only in front.  Marauding parties of Batoka, calling themselves Makololo, have for some time had a wholesome dread of Sinamane’s “long spears.”  Before going to Tette our Batoka friend, Masakasa, was one of a party that came to steal some of the young women; but Sinamane, to their utter astonishment, attacked them so furiously that the survivors barely escaped with their lives.  Masakasa had to flee so fast that he threw away his shield, his spear, and his clothes, and returned home a wiser and a sadder man.