We remained next day.

Took lunars.
We had now passed through, at the narrowest part, the hundred miles of depopulated country, of which about seventy are on the N.E.of Mataka.
The native accounts differ as to the cause.

Some say slave wars, and assert that the Makoa from the vicinity of Mozambique played an important part in them; others say famine; others that the people have moved to and beyond Nyassa.[18] Certain it is, from the potsherds strewed over the country, and the still remaining ridges on which beans, sorghum, maize, and cassava, were planted, that the departed population was prodigious.

The Waiyau, who are now in the country, came from the other side of the Rovuma, and they probably supplanted the Manganja, an operation which we see going on at the present day.
_4th August, 1866._--An hour and a half brought us to Miule, a village on the same level with Mbanga; and the chief pressing us to stay, on the plea of our sleeping two nights in the jungle, instead of one if we left early next morning, we consented.

I asked him what had become of the very large iron-smelting population of this region; he said many had died of famine, others had fled to the west of Nyassa: the famine is the usual effect of slave wars, and much death is thereby caused--probably much more than by the journey to the coast.