There is now a decided scantiness of trees.

Many of the hill-tops are covered with grass or another plant; there is pleasure now in seeing them bare.

Ferns, rhododendrons, and a foliaged tree, which looks in the distance like silver-fir, are met with.
The Mandare root is here called Nyumbo, when cooked it has a slight degree of bitterness with it which cultivation may remove.

Mica schist crowned some of the heights on the watershed, then gneiss, and now, as we descend further, we have igneous rocks of more recent eruption, porphyry and gneiss, with hornblende.

A good deal of ferruginous conglomerate, with holes in it, covers many spots; when broken, it looks like yellow haematite, with black linings to the holes: this is probably the ore used in former times by the smiths, of whose existence we now find still more evidence than further east.
_31st July, 1866._--I had presented Pezimba with a cloth, so he cooked for us handsomely last night, and this morning desired us to wait a little as he had not yet sufficient meal made to present: we waited and got a generous present.
It was decidedly milder here than at Mataka's, and we had a clear sky.
In our morning's march we passed the last of the population, and went on through a fine well-watered fruitful country, to sleep near a mountain called Mtewire, by a stream called Msapo.