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At 1 P.M. we resumed our loads and walking staffs, and in a short time were en route for the Ngwhalah Mtoni, distant eight and three-quarter miles from the khambi. The sun was hot; like a globe of living, seething flame, it flared its heat full on our heads; then as it descended towards the west, scorched the air before it was inhaled by the lungs which craved it.
A descent of a few hundred feet terminated in a deep but dry mtoni with a sandy bed, on the other side of which we had to regain the elevation we had lost, and a similar country opened into view until we found a newly-made boma with well-built huts of grass rear a pool of water, which we at once occupied as a halting-place for the night.
From Tura to the Kwala Mtoni is seventeen and a half miles, a distance which, however easy it may be traversed once a fortnight, assumes a prodigious length when one has to travel it almost every other day, at least, so my pagazis, soldiers, and followers found it, and their murmurs were very loud when I ordered the signal to be sounded on the march.
Kigwa we found to have been visited by the same vengeance which rendered Rubuga such a waste. The next day, after a three and a half hours' rapid march, we crossed the mtoni which was no mtoni separating Kigwa from Unyanyembe district, and after a short halt to quench our thirst, in three and a half hours more arrived at Shiza.
The adoption of this new road to Unyanyembe by which we were travelling was now explained we were enabled to avoid the passes and stiff steeps of Rubeho, and had nothing worse to encounter than a broad smooth plain, which sloped gently to Ugogo. After a march of fifteen miles we camped at a dry mtoni, called Matamombo, celebrated for its pools of bitter. water of the colour of ochre.
The Nghwhalah commences in Ubanarama to the north a country famous for its fine breed of donkeys and after running south, south-south-west, crosses the Unyanyembe road, from which point it has more of a westerly turn. On the 16th we arrived at Madedita, so called from a village which was, but is now no more. Madedita is twelve and a half miles from the Nghwhalah Mtoni.
A cluster of date palm-trees, overtopping a dense grove close to the mtoni of Mgongo Tembo, revived my recollections of Egypt. The banks of the stream, with their verdant foliage, presented a strange contrast to the brown and dry appearance of the jungle which lay on either side.
The weight of the saddles was 16 lbs., as the spring balance-scale indicated, yet Abdul Kader became weary of life, as, he counted the long marches that intervened between the mtoni and Unyanyembe. On the ground he fell prone, to kiss my feet, begging me in the name of God to permit him to depart.
After crossing a beautiful little plain intersected by a dry gully or mtoni, the route led by a few cultivated fields, where the tillers greeted us with one grand unwinking stare, as if fascinated. Soon after we met one of those sights common in part of the world, to wit a chain slave-gang, bound east.
The caravan must proceed woe befall him who lags behind, for hunger and thirst will overtake him so must a ship drive before the fierce gale to escape foundering woe befall him who falls overboard! An abundance of water, good, sweet, and cool, was found in the bed of the mtoni in deep stony reservoirs. Here also the traces of furious torrents were clearly visible as at Mabunguru.
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