But the globe-trotter who is anxious to record in his diary the precise hour and minute of all momentous events of a monotonous voyage may easily overlook the all-important tree. The most eager inquirer may find his experiences pall upon him when for hour after hour he sees nothing but level shore, and a foreground of green _bango_-reeds festooned with dull magenta convolvulus. In fact, the reason why the boundary had to be marked by a board affixed to a tree, is because this particular angle of alluvial land is so level and devoid of natural features that, in the rainy season, there is usually one navigable channel, if not more, cutting it off into an island, by connecting the Shiré and Zambezi. On the eastern bank we have left Mount Morambala behind—a massive ridge, extending over several miles and reaching a height of 4000 feet. Beyond the flats in the north-east you see the strangely shaped cone of Chinga-Chinga Mountain against the sky, and later on other ranges come into view; but just here the river valley is a marsh (some parts of it an actual lake) in the wet season, and a dusty plain at the end of the dry. The Portuguese territory on the eastern bank extends a little farther north till it reaches a more tangible boundary in the river Ruo, which rushes down from Matapwiri’s Mountain in the north-east, throwing itself over a fall of 200 feet, and then, winding through the same sort of plain as that already described, enters the Shiré through a sort of miniature delta, by the reedy island of Malo and the ‘lip’ of land where now stands the British township of Chiromo. I have spoken all along of the Shiré River; and it is not now to be expected that Europeans will ever call it anything else; but it is perhaps unnecessary to say that no native, unless thoroughly accustomed to Europeans and their ways, would ever know it by that name. To him it is the _Nyanja_, or, if he happens to be a Yao, the _Nyasa_—a word which means any large body of water, whether river or lake. To those living near Lake Nyasa, it is the lake which is Nyanja or Nyasa, as the case may be; it is only European usage which has stereotyped the Yao word on our maps. _Chiri_, in the Mang’anja language, means ‘a steep bank,’ and was misunderstood (by the Portuguese, probably, as it seems to have been in use before Livingstone penetrated the country) as the name of the river; since a native would say, ‘I am going to the _bank_,’ where we should say, ‘I am going to the _river_.’ As Sir H. H. Johnston has remarked, the Zambezi is the only one of the four great African rivers which bears a name given by, or even known to, the people dwelling on it.