_4th April, 1873._--Sent over to Kabinga to buy a cow, and got a fat one for 2-1/2 dotis, to give the party a feast ere we start. The kambari fish of the Chambezé is three feet three inches in length. Two others, the "polwé" and "lopatakwao," all go up the Chambezé to spawn when the rains begin. Casembe's people make caviare of the spawn of the "pumbo." [The next entry is made in a new pocket-book, numbered XVII. For the first few days pen and ink were used, afterwards a well-worn stump of pencil, stuck into a steel penholder and attached to a piece of bamboo, served his purpose.] _5th April, 1873._--March from Kabinga's on the Chambezé, our luggage in canoes, and men on land. We punted on flood six feet deep, with many ant-hills all about, covered with trees. Course S.S.E. for five miles, across the River Lobingela, sluggish, and about 300 yards wide. _6th April, 1873._--Leave in the same way, but men were sent from Kabinga to steal the canoes, which we paid his brother Mateysa handsomely for. A stupid drummer, beating the alarm in the distance, called us inland; we found the main body of our people had gone on, and so by this, our party got separated,[31] and we pulled and punted six or seven hours S.W. in great difficulty, as the fishermen we saw refused to show us where the deep water lay. The whole country S. of the Lake was covered with water, thickly dotted over with lotus-leaves and rushes. It has a greenish appearance, and it might be well on a map to show the spaces annually flooded by a broad wavy band, twenty, thirty, and even, forty miles out from the permanent banks of the Lake: it might be coloured light green. The broad estuaries fifty or more miles, into which the rivers form themselves, might be coloured blue, but it is quite impossible at present to tell where land ends, and Lake begins; it is all water, water everywhere, which seems to be kept from flowing quickly off by the narrow bed of the Luapula, which has perpendicular banks, worn deep down in new red sandstone. It is the Nile apparently enacting its inundations, even at its sources. The amount of water spread out over the country constantly excites my wonder; it is prodigious. Many of the ant-hills are cultivated and covered with dura, pumpkins, beans, maize, but the waters yield food plenteously in fish and lotus-roots. A species of wild rice grows, but the people neither need it nor know it. A party of fishermen fled from us, but by coaxing we got them to show us deep water. They then showed us an islet, about thirty yards square, without wood, and desired us to sleep there. We went on, and then they decamped.