_21st April, 1866._--After a great deal of cutting we reached the valley of Mehambwe to spend Sunday, all glad that it had come round again. Here some men came to our camp from Ndonde, who report that an invasion of Mazitu had three months ago swept away all the food out of the country, and they are now obliged to send in every direction for provisions. When saluting, they catch each other's hands and say, "Ai! Ai!" but the general mode (introduced, probably by the Arabs) is to take hold of the right hand, and say, "Marhaba" (welcome). A wall-eyed ill-looking fellow, who helped to urge on the attack on our first visit in 1861, and the man to whom I gave cloth to prevent a collision, came about us disguised in a jacket. I knew him well, but said nothing to him.[7] _23rd April, 1866._--When we marched this morning we passed the spot where an animal had been burned in the fire, and on enquiry I found that it is the custom when a leopard is killed to take off the skin and consume the carcase thus, because the Makonde do not eat it. The reason they gave for not eating flesh which is freely eaten by other tribes, is that the leopard devours men; this shows the opposite of an inclination to cannibalism. All the rocks we had seen showed that the plateau consists of grey sandstone, capped by a ferruginous sandy conglomerate. We now came to blocks of silicified wood lying on the surface; it is so like recent wood, that no one who has not handled it would conceive it to be stone and not wood: the outer surface preserves the grain or woody fibre, the inner is generally silica. Buffaloes bitten by tsetse again show no bad effects from it: one mule is, however, dull and out of health; I thought that this might be the effect of the bite till I found that his back was so strained that he could not stoop to drink, and could only eat the tops of the grasses. An ox would have been ill in two days after the biting on the 7th. A carrier stole a shirt, and went off unsuspected; when the loss was ascertained, the man's companions tracked him with Ben Ali by night, got him in his hut, and then collected the headmen of the village, who fined him about four times the value of what had been stolen. They came back in the morning without seeming to think that they had done aught to be commended; this was the only case of theft we had noticed, and the treatment showed a natural sense of justice. _24th April, 1866._--We had showers occasionally, but at night all the men were under cover of screens. The fevers were speedily cured; no day was lost by sickness, but we could not march more than a few miles, owing to the slowness of the sepoys; they are a heavy drag on us, and of no possible use, except when acting as sentries at night.