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directions. At the foot of the hill you find heavy sand,
until you reach the Lotsani river, about six miles from
Palapshwe.
We arrived there at 9 a.m. and outspanned. I then
went with Major and Chickwe, a Zambezi boy, to see if the
river could easily be crossed. I found it hardly thirty
feet broad, but with a precipitous bank on the offside.
Just then, some natives started crossing i t : muddy water
was rushing down at a great speed, and the natives formed
a human chain, holding each other by the hand before
getting into it. These precautions seemed superfluous,
but I soon discovered how necessary they were; the foremost
man soon got water above his chest, and it was all
he could do to keep his legs, so powerful was the current.
Two girls who were in the party were carried bodily off
their legs, and only saved from drowning through the precaution
I have described. Unfortunately in their struggle
their clothes that they had not removed—consisting of a
piece of calico tied round their breast—got disentangled,
and floated away. Great was the ladies’ dismay—and,
unwilling to appear in a state of nature before a white
man, they could not be induced to get out of the water.
Shortly, however, the cold got the better of their modesty,
and getting out of the stream they rushed, screaming and
laughing, towards some reeds. There another girl took
them some skins she had borrowed from their male companions,
and they proceeded on their way to the town.
Getting my waggon across with such a depth of water
and such a current was out of the question ; and it was
well I did not try, for in the evening, an empty native
waggon, having attempted the passage, got swept away
and rolled over, two of the oxen being drowned. During
the night more rain fell, and the next morning the river
was fuller still. I planted some sticks in the mud to mark
the rise or fall of the water, but during the whole day
it remained pretty much the same. All the afternoon
we suffered terribly from the attacks of millions of vicious