shows but little difference of level.  The bed is broad and deep, but the course is rather tortuous at first, and makes a long bend to the east till it comes within five or six miles of the base of Mount Zomba.  The natives regarded the Upper Shire as a prolongation of Lake Nyassa; for where what we called the river approaches Lake Shirwa, a little north of the mountains, they said that the hippopotami, “which are great night travellers,” pass from one lake into the other.  There the land is flat, and only a short land journey would be necessary.  Seldom does the current here exceed a knot an hour, while that of the Lower Shire is from two to two-and-a-half knots.  Our land party of Makololo accompanied us along the right bank, and passed thousands of Manganja fugitives living in temporary huts on that side, who had recently been driven from their villages on the opposite hills by the Ajawa.

The soil was dry and hard, and covered with mopane-trees; but some of the Manganja were busy hoeing the ground and planting the little corn they had brought with them.  The effects of hunger were already visible on those whose food had been seized or burned by the Ajawa and Portuguese slave-traders.  The spokesman or prime minister of one of the chiefs, named Kalonjere, was a humpbacked dwarf, a fluent speaker, who tried hard to make us go over and drive off the Ajawa; but he could not deny that by selling people Kalonjere had invited these slave-hunters to the country.  This is the second humpbacked dwarf we have found occupying the like important post, the other was the prime minister of a Batonga chief on the Zambesi.

As we sailed along, we disturbed many white-breasted cormorants; we had seen the same species fishing between the cataracts.  Here, with many other wild-fowls, they find subsistence on the smooth water by night, and sit sleepily on trees and in the reeds by day.  Many hippopotami were seen in the river, and one of them stretched its wide jaws, as if to swallow the whole stern of the boat, close to Dr. Kirk’s back; the animal was so near that, in opening its mouth, it lashed a quantity of water on to the stern-sheets, but did no damage.  To avoid large marauding parties of Ajawa, on the left bank of the Shire, we continued on the right, or western side, with our land party, along the shore of the small lake Pamalombe.  This lakelet is ten or twelve miles in length, and five or six broad.  It is nearly surrounded by a broad belt of papyrus, so dense that we could scarcely find an opening to the shore.  The plants, ten or twelve feet high, grew so closely together that air was excluded, and so much sulphuretted hydrogen gas evolved that by one night’s exposure the bottom of the boat was blackened.  Myriads of mosquitoes showed, as probably they always do, the presence of malaria.