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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.

While detained by a storm on the 17th October at the mouth of the Kaombe, we were visited by several men belonging to an Arab who had been for fourteen years in the interior at Katanga's, south of Cazembe's. They had just brought down ivory, malachite, copper rings, and slaves to exchange for cloth at the lake.

We arrived at Kota-kota Bay in the afternoon of the 10th September, 1863; and sat down under a magnificent wild fig-tree with leaves ten inches long, by five broad, about a quarter of a mile from the village of Juma ben Saidi, and Yakobe ben Arame, whom we had met on the River Kaombe, a little north of this, in our first exploration of the Lake.

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.