The first day’s march led us over a rich, well-cultivated plain.  This was succeeded by highlands, undulating, stony, and covered with scraggy trees.  Many banks of well rounded shingle appear.  The disintegration of the rocks, now going on, does not round off the angles; they are split up by the heat and cold into angular fragments.  On these high downs we crossed the River Kaombe.  Beyond it we came among the upland vegetation—­rhododendrons, proteas, the masuko, and molompi.  At the foot of the hill, Kasuko-suko, we found the River Bua running north to join the Kaombe.  We had to go a mile out of our way for a ford; the stream is deep enough in parts for hippopotami.  The various streams not previously noticed, crossed in this journey, had before this led us to the conclusion, independently of the testimony of the natives, that no large river ran into the north end of the Lake.  No such affluent was needed to account for the Shire’s perennial flow.

On September 15th we reached the top of the ascent which, from its many ups and downs, had often made us puff and blow as if broken-winded.  The water of the streams we crossed was deliciously cold, and now that we had gained the summit at Ndonda, where the boiling-point of water showed an altitude of 3440 feet above the sea, the air was delightful.  Looking back we had a magnificent view of the Lake, but the haze prevented our seeing beyond the sea horizon.  The scene was beautiful, but it was impossible to dissociate the lovely landscape whose hills and dales had so sorely tried our legs and lungs, from the sad fact that this was part of the great slave route now actually in use.  By this road many “Ten thousands” have here seen “the Sea,” “the Sea,” but with sinking hearts; for the universal idea among the captive gangs is, that they are going to be fattened and eaten by the whites.  They cannot of course be so much shocked as we should be—­their sensibilities are far from fine, their feelings are more obtuse than ours—­in fact, “the live eels are used to being skinned,” perhaps they rather like it.  We who are not philosophic, blessed the Providence which at Thermopylae in ancient days rolled back the tide of Eastern conquest from the West, and so guided the course of events that light and liberty and gospel truth spread to our distant isle, and emancipating our race freed them from the fear of ever again having to climb fatiguing heights and descend wearisome hollows in a slave-gang, as we suppose they did when the fair English youths were exposed for sale at Rome.

Looking westwards we perceived that, what from below had the appearance of mountains, was only the edge of a table-land which, though at first undulating, soon became smooth, and sloped towards the centre of the country.  To the south a prominent mountain called Chipata, and to the south-west another named Ngalla, by which the Bua is said to rise, gave character to the landscape.  In the north, masses of hills prevented our seeing more than eight or ten miles.