Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/453

 gave the track the name of the “Westbeech road.” In the evening we came to a grass plain almost entirely enclosed by woods, where the Maytengue river in its course from the Makalaka lands is said to lose itself in the soil.

The Maytengue appears to diminish both inbreadth and depth towards its mouth, and its banks are literally riddled with pitfalls. We crossed a great many deep but narrow dry rain-channels, hundreds of which find their way to the river, but flow for so short a time that they hardly make any appreciable difference to the stream, which consequently dwindles away in the lower part of its wide sandy bed; the longer section of its course runs through the fine hill-country occupied by Menon’s Makalakas.

Throughout the whole of the next day we followed the right hand bank of the stream. Bradshaw had an attack of dysentery, and Westbeech was so far from well that I insisted upon his coming for a time under my immediate charge. Ever since we left Panda ma Tenka the weather had been very trying, the days, and especially the afternoons, being extremely sultry, the nights bitterly cold.

Just before we crossed the Maytengue on the 21st, my attention was called to a tall hollow mapani-tree, beneath which a Makalaka chief had been buried. The people had a superstition that their “morimo,” or unseen god, resided in the tree, and as they passed by were in the habit of dropping their bracelets into the hollow trunk. They had the same belief about one of the caves in the hills, and carried presents every year to the spot.

The country became more elevated as we proceeded, and some hills of granite rose in front of us,