Fifteen minutes of hard paddling landed us at Selele, a stony point between two sandy baylets:  amongst the mass of angular boulders a tree again showed the highest flood-mark to be 13 feet.  Here for the first time I remarked the black glaze concerning which so much has been written.[FN#28] The colour is a sunburnt black, tinted ferruginous red like meteoric stones, and it is generally friable, crumbling under the nails.  It tastes strongly of iron, which flavours almost every spring in the country, yet the most likely places do not show this incrustation.  Sometimes it looks like a matrix in which pudding-stone has been imbedded; it may be two or three lines in thickness and it does not colour the inside.  At other times it hardly measures the thickness of paper, coating the gneiss slabs like plumbago.  Humboldt tells us ("Personal Narrative,” ii. 243, Bohn), that the “Indians” of the Atures declare the rocks to be burnt (carbonized) by the sun’s rays, and I have often found the same black glaze upon the marly sandstones that alternate with calcareous formations where no stream ever reached them—­for instance, on the highlands of Judea, between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea; in inner Istria, and in most countries upon the borders of the Mediterranean.

Leaving Selele, we ascended a steep hill with many glissades, the effect of last night’s rain.  These hammock-journeys are mostly equivalent to walking and paying for carriage; it would be cruelty to animals were one to ride except when entering the villages.  After threading for half an hour lanes of grass, we were received in a little village of the Banza Vivi district by Nessala, linguistere to King Luvungungwete.  The guest room was furnished with every luxury; hides of a fine antelope described as the Kudu; cruets, basins, bottles, and other vases; “lustre mugs,” John Andersons and Toby Philpots.  A good calabash, full of

                    “Freshening wine
          More bounteous far than all the frantic juice
          Which Bacchus pours,”

was produced, although the drought and scarcity of June rain had dried the palms.  Before I outstretched myself, the fairer half of the population sent a message to say that they had never seen a white man:  what less could be done than to distribute a few beads and pat the children, who screamed like sucking pigs and “squirmed” like young monkeys?

The Chrononhotonthologus of a king came in the afternoon with a tail of a hundred vertebrae:  he was a milder specimen than usual; he had neither Mambrino’s helmet nor beadle’s cloak, and perhaps his bashfulness in the presence of strangers arose from a consciousness that his head-gear and robes were not in keeping with his station.  But he did not fail to grumble at his “dash;” indeed, he must be more than African who shall say, “Hold! enough.”  He vouchsafed a small return in fowls and “beneficent manioc,” and sent with us three slaves, to serve, not as guides, but as a basis for a separate charge.