punishment
for the sacrilege. The Batoka believe that Sekote had a pot of medicine
buried here, which, when opened, would cause an epidemic in the country.
These tyrants acted much on the fears of their people.

As this was the point from which we intended to strike off to the
northeast, I resolved on the following day to visit the falls of
Victoria, called by the natives Mosioatunya, or more anciently Shongwe.
Of these we had often heard since we came into the country; indeed, one
of the questions asked by Sebituane was, "Have you smoke that sounds in
your country?" They did not go near enough to examine them, but, viewing
them with awe at a distance, said, in reference to the vapor and noise,
"Mosi oa tunya" (smoke does sound there). It was previously called
Shongwe, the meaning of which I could not ascertain. The word for a
"pot" resembles this, and it may mean a seething caldron, but I am not
certain of it. Being persuaded that Mr. Oswell and myself were the
very first Europeans who ever visited the Zambesi in the centre of the
country, and that this is the connecting link between the known and
unknown portions of that river, I decided to use the same liberty as the
Makololo did, and gave the only English name I have affixed to any part
of the country. No better proof of previous ignorance of this river
could be desired than that an untraveled gentleman, who had spent a
great part of his life in the study of the geography of Africa, and knew
every thing written on the subject from the time of Ptolemy downward,
actually asserted in the "Athenaeum", while I was coming up the Red Sea,
that this magnificent river, the Leeambye, had "no connection with the
Zambesi, but flowed under the Kalahari Desert, and became lost;" and
"that, as all the old maps asserted, the Zambesi took its rise in the
very hills to which we have now come." This modest assertion smacks
exactly as if a native of Timbuctoo should declare that the "Thames" and
the "Pool" were different rivers, he having seen neither the one nor the
other. Leeambye and Zambesi mean the very same thing, viz., the RIVER.

Sekeletu intended to accompany me, but, one canoe only having come
instead of the two he had ordered, he resigned it to me. After twenty
minutes' sail from Kalai we came in sight, for the first time, of the
columns of vapor appropriately called "smoke", rising at a distance of
five or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in
Afri