The descent was a malevoie, over slabs and boulders, loose stones and clayey ground, slippery as ice after rain.  The moleques descended like chamois within twenty minutes:  Selim and I, with booted feet, took double the time, but on return we ascended it in forty-five minutes.  Viewed from below, the base rests upon cliffs of gneiss, with debris and quartz in masses, bands and pebbles, pure and impure, white and rusty.  Upon it rises a stratum of ferruginous clay, with large hard-heads of granite, gneiss, and schist, blocks of conglomerate, and nodules of ironstone.  Higher still is the bank of yellow clay, capped with shallow humus.  The waving profile is backed by steep hills, with rocky sides and long ridges of ground, the site of the palm-hidden Banzas.

Reaching the base, a heap of tumbled boulders, we crossed in a canoe the mouth of the Npozo to a sandy cove in the southern bank, the terminus of river navigation.  The people called it Unyenge Assiku:  I cannot but suspect that this is the place where Tuckey left his boats, and which he terms “Nomaza Cove.”  The name is quite unknown, and suggests that the interpreters tried to explain by “No majia” (water) that here the voyage must end.

Off this baylet are three rocky islets, disposed in a triangle, slabs collected by a broken reef, and collectively known as Zunga Nuapozo; the clear-way is between them and the southern bank, which is partly provided with a backwater; the northern three quarters of the bed show something like a scour and a rapid.  Zunga chya Ingololo, the northernmost and smallest, bears a single tree, and projects a bar far into the stream:  the central and westernmost is a rock with a canoe passage between it and the southern and largest, Zunga chya Tuvi.  The latter has three tree-clumps; and a patch of clean white sand on its western side measures the daily rise of the water, eight inches to a foot, and shows the highest level of the flood, here twelve to thirteen feet.  The fishermen use it as a drying-ground for their game.  They also crowd every day to two sandy covelets on the southern bank, separated by a tongue of rough boulders.  Here naked urchins look on whilst their fathers work, or aid in drying the nets, or lie prone upon the sand, exposing their backs to the broiling sun.  The other denizens of the place are fish-eagles, who sit en faction upon the topmost branches of withered trees.  I saw only two kinds of fish, one small as a minnow, and the other approaching the size of a herring.  Up stream they are said to be much larger.  They are not salted, but smoked or sun-dried when the weather serves:  stuffed with chillies and fried with oil, they are good eating as the Kinnam of the Gold Coast.