The forests of Northern Barotseland have one or more species of wild plantain (_Musa_) and either wild or introduced examples of the oil palm, where the rainfall is over fifty inches per annum. This may have been introduced from Congoland or Northern Angola by the natives, who in the north of the Barotse country are so closely connected with the peoples of the Congo basin; or as in the case of North Nyasaland and Zanzibar Id., it may be a separate species or sub-species of the _Elaïs_ genus. According to the reports of later travellers, there is much woodland and scrub on the higher land—4,000 to 4,500 feet—on the west side of the Zambezi, south of the Kabompo-Zambezi junction. This woodland is also repeated, less markedly, to the east of the great river where the land likewise rises. The Mankoya country (Eastern Barotseland) has a larger, steadier rainfall than Sesheke and the southern regions; and the Mashukulumbwe table-land, and the valley of the upper Kafue are said to be well and regularly watered countries. The more scattered growth of trees (occasional fine and large trees are common) seems due to human intervention. The natives of the Lukona province, towards Angola, are a wilder, less intelligent race than folk of Tonga kinship on the east, and not so eager to promote tree planting. Bulovale (the region between the Luena and Kabompo rivers) and north of the Kabompo up to the boundary of the Zambezi watershed are well forested regions. The central valley of the Zambezi—“Borotse proper,”[4] as it might be called, the region which the Barotse (really the Aluyi) have so long dominated—ranges from below the Zambezi-Kabompo confluence on the north to the Gonye Falls on the south, and is about 150 miles long and 60 miles broad. It is the bed—most observers think—of the old lake of the Upper Zambezi, and presents to-day an utterly flat and treeless aspect. Then ensue from Gonye to Katima, some eighty miles of rapids or falls. From Katongo to Mambova, past the now world-famed Sesheke, where Livingstone and Oswell first “discovered” the Zambezi, there are fifty miles of navigable river; then two more rapids at Mambova and Nkalata, and then another navigable stretch of some sixty miles to the vicinity of the Victoria Falls. (These lie well outside the political limits of Barotseland, the boundary striking north along the Majili river, ten miles east of Sesheke.) The plain of the extinct lake is much flooded during the winter rains, when a good deal of central Barotseland is under water. The rainy season seems, however, to be tending more and more towards the spring months (the autumn of South Central Africa).