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Moamba's village was a mile off, and on the left bank of the Merengé, a larger stream than the Merungu flowing north and having its banks and oozes covered with fine, tall, straight, evergreen trees. The village is surrounded with a stockade, and a dry ditch some fifteen or twenty feet wide, and as many deep.
The watershed begins to have a northern slope about Moamba's, lat. 10° 10' S., but the streams are very tortuous, and the people have very confused ideas as to where they run.
Here we met Moamba's people, but declined going to his village, as huts are disagreeable; they often have vermin, and one is exposed to the gaze of a crowd through a very small doorway. The people in their curiosity often make the place dark, and the impudent ones offer characteristic remarks, then raise a laugh, and run away.
The Lokhopa, for instance, was asserted by all the men at Moamba's to flow into Lokholu, and then into a river going to Liemba, but a young wife of Moamba, who seemed very intelligent, maintained that Lokhopa and Lokholu went to the Chambezé; I therefore put it down thus.
It seems almost too ridiculous to believe that we have here the exact equivalent of the schoolboy's demonstrative "Do you see any green in my eye?" nevertheless it looks wonderfully like it! Chitapangwa's parting oath. Course laid for Lake Tanganyika. Moamba's village. Another watershed. The Babemba tribe. Ill with fever. Threatening attitude of Chibué's people. Continued illness.
I have been ill of fever ever since we left Moamba's; every step I take jars in the chest, and I am very weak; I can scarcely keep up the march, though formerly I was always first, and had to hold in my pace not to leave the people altogether. I have a constant singing in the ears, and can scarcely hear the loud tick of the chronometers.
I found one going north; but the boys pretended that they did not see my mark, and went west, evidently afraid of incurring Moamba's displeasure by passing him. I found them in an old hut, and made the best of it by saying nothing. They said that they had wandered; that was, they had never left the west-going path. 22nd February, 1867. We came to a perennial rivulet running north, the Merungu.
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