[A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries by David Livingstone]@TWC D-Link bookA Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries CHAPTER II 12/45
When at a later period they climbed up the north-western base of this same mountain, the familiar face of the onion-shaped one opposite was at once recognised; one point of view on the talus of Mount Morumbwa was not more than 700 or 800 yards distant from the other, and they then completed the survey of Kebrabasa from end to end. They did not attempt to return by the way they came, but scaled the slope of the mountain on the north.
It took them three hours' hard labour in cutting their way up through the dense thornbush which covered the ascent.
The face of the slope was often about an angle of 70 degrees, yet their guide Shokumbenla, whose hard, horny soles, resembling those of elephants, showed that he was accustomed to this rough and hot work, carried a pot of water for them nearly all the way up.
They slept that night at a well in a tufaceous rock on the N.W.of Chipereziwa, and never was sleep more sweet. A band of native musicians came to our camp one evening, on our own way down, and treated us with their wild and not unpleasant music on the Marimba, an instrument formed of bars of hard wood of varying breadth and thickness, laid on different-sized hollow calabashes, and tuned to give the notes; a few pieces of cloth pleased them, and they passed on. The rainy season of Tette differs a little from that of some of the other intertropical regions; the quantity of rain-fall being considerably less. It begins in November and ends in April.
During our first season in that place, only a little over nineteen inches of rain fell.
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