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Updated: June 17, 2025
We passed village after village that had been burnt, and were mere blackened heaps of charred timber and smoked clay; field after field of grain ripe years ago was yet standing in the midst of a crop of gums and thorns, mimosa and kolquall. We arrived at the village, occupied by about sixty Wangwana, who have settled here to make a living by buying and selling ivory.
Numerous villages are seen on this land because the intervening spaces are not occupied with the rank and luxuriant jungle common in other parts of Africa. Were it not for the Euphorbia kolquall of Abyssinia which some chief has caused to be planted as a defence round the villages one might see from one end of Mugihewa to the other.
Down to the river-bed sloped the Mpwapwa, roughened in some places by great boulders of basalt, or by rock masses, which had parted from a precipitous scarp, where clung the kolquall with a sure hold, drawing nourishment where every other green thing failed; clad in others by the hardy mimosa, which rose like a sloping bank of green verdure almost to the summit.
The 16th of May saw us journeying over the plain which lies between Ugombo and Mpwapwa, skirting close, at intervals, a low range of trap-rock, out of which had become displaced by some violent agency several immense boulders. On its slopes grew the kolquall to a size which I had not seen in Abyssinia. In the plain grew baobab, and immense tamarind, and a variety of thorn.
As might be expected, before I had gone a few paces a branch of the acacia horrida only one of a hundred such annoyances caught the right leg of my pyjamas at the knee, and ripped it almost clean off; succeeding which a stumpy kolquall caught me by the shoulder, and another rip was the inevitable consequence.
Fertile soils and spontaneous vegetation, reeking with miasma and overpowering from their odour, we had exchanged for a drouthy wilderness of aloetic and cactaceous plants, where the kolquall and several thorn bushes grew paramount. Instead of the tree-clad heights, slopes and valleys, instead of cultivated fields, we saw now the confines of uninhabited wilderness.
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