These mountains are mostly granite and quartzite. West of the lake and the Shiré, there are outcrops of sandstone, and this part of the country also contains coal. Iron ore is abundant almost everywhere, especially the form called hæmatite—a soft, red stone, known to the natives as _ng’ama_ or _kundwe_, and used by them as paint, and as medicine; lumps of this can be picked up in the beds of all the mountain streams. Graphite, or black lead, is found in the same way, and is used by the women for colouring their pottery, to which it gives an effect exactly like stove-polish. I think these are the only minerals of which they themselves take much account. Gold exists in the quartz in some places, and Sir Harry Johnston says: ‘In the valleys of the rivers flowing south to the Zambezi (in Mpezeni’s country), gold really does exist, and was worked at Misale by the half-caste Portuguese,’ in the eighteenth century, and even later. But the Mang’anja and Yaos only know it through their dealings with Portuguese and Arabs, and have no word for it in their languages. _Ndalama_, which, with the addition of ‘red,’ means gold, and of ‘white,’ silver, and by itself = ‘money,’ is, I fancy, a borrowed word—the Arabic _dirhem_. I once bought (in the West Shiré district) a bangle of pure copper, which was vaguely said to have been obtained from a place to the north-west, but where it had been worked, I could not ascertain. The brass which is fashioned by native craftsmen is always bought from traders. [Illustration: CARRIERS RESTING IN THE BUSH]