up, and they sell the medicine which professes to make good
marksmen; others are rain doctors, &c. &c. The various
schools deal in little charms, which are hung round the purchaser’s
neck to avert evil ■ some of them contain the medicine,
others increase its power.
Indigo, about three or four feet high, grows in great luxuriance
in the streets of Tette, and so does the Senna plant.
The leaves are undistinguishable from those imported in
Endand. We set the Makololo to collect specimens, hut
the natives objected to their doing so, though they themselves
never make use of them. A small amount of first-rate
cotton is cultivated by the native population for the manufacture
of a coarse cloth. In former times the Portuguese
collected it at a cheap rate, and made use of it instead of the
calico now imported, to exchange for the Manica gold dust,
A neighbouring tribe raises the sugar-cane, and makes, a
little sugar; but they use most primitive wooden rollers,
and having no skill in mixing lime with , the extracted juice,
the product is of course of very inferior quality. Plenty of magnetic
iron-ore is found near Tette, and coal also to any amount;
a single cliff-seam measuring twenty-five feet in thickness. It
was found to bum well in the steamer on the first'trial. The
ash showed a large quantity of shaly refuse; but, suspecting
that this was from the coal near the surface having been
exposed to the weather for ages, we drove a shaft of some
thirty feet, and the mineral was found to improve the further
we went in. Gold is washed for in the beds of rivers,
within a couple of days of Tette. The natives are fully aware
of its value, but seldom search for it, and never dig deeper
than four or five feet. They dread lest the falling in of the
sand of the river’s bed should bury them. In former times,
when traders went with hundreds of slaves to the washings,