married to another, and had two children by him, but
that did not signify, as it was found in time her husband
had committed a fault, on account of which it was thought
necessary to confiscate all his property.
At this place all the people were in a constant state of
inebriety, drinking pombé all day and all Halt 13¿&. . night. I shot a montana antelope, and sent
its head and skin back to Grant, accompanied with my
daily report to Rumanika.
Maúla having joined me, we marched down to near the
end of the fork overlooking the plain of Kit- To Nartieri, lith . v , , , TT _ ° :: .. angulé—rtne YVaganda drums beating, and
whistles playing all the way as we went along.
We next descended from the Mountains of the Moon,
To Kitangüié and spanned a long alluvial plain to the settlemL
ment of the so-long-heard-of Kitangülé, where
Rümanika keeps his thousands and thousands of cows.
In former days the dense green forests peculiar to the
tropics, which grow in swampy places about this plain,
were said to have been stocked by vast herds of elephants;
but, since the ivory trade had increased, these
animals had all been driven off to the hills of Kisiwa and
Uhaiya, or into Uddü beyond the river, and all the way
down to the N’yanza.
To-day we reached the Kitangülé Kagéra, or river,
which, as I ascertained in the year 1858, falls
To Ndongo, 1 Qth. . , TT. . T. j i . into the V ictoria JN yanza on tne west side.
Most unfortunately, as we led off to cross it, rain began to
pour, so that everybody and everything was thrown into
confusion. I could not get a sketch of it, though Grant
was more fortunate afterwards; neither could I measure
or fathom i t ; and it was only after a long contest with
the superstitious boatmen that they allowed me to cross
in their canoe with my shoes on, as they thought the
vessel would either upset, or else the river would dry up,
in consequence of their Neptune taking offence at me.
Once over, I looked down on the noble stream with considerable
pride. About eighty yards broad, it was sunk
Perry On the Kitangule River
down a considerable depth below the surface of the land,
like a huge canal, and is so deep, it could not be poled by
the canoemen; while it runs at a velocity of from three
to four knots an hour.
I say I viewed it with pride, because I had formed my
judgment of its being fed from high-seated springs in
the Mountains of the Moon solely on scientific geographical
reasonings; and, from the bulk of the stream, I also
believed those mountains must attain an altitude of 8000
feet* or more, just as we find they do in Riianda. I
thought then to myself, as I did at Rtimanika’s, when I
first viewed the Mfumbiro cones, and gathered all my
distant geographical information there, that these highly
saturated Mountains of the Moon give birth to the Congo
* In ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ for August 1859.