one hundred yards wide, but very shallow, and
with its water so turbid that we could not see the bottom where the
depth exceeded two feet. It was noon; the breeze had dropped, and the
sun was so strong that we gladly took refuge in the little cabin or
rather covered box--a sort of hen coop--at the stern. The stream and the
tide were with us, and we had four native rowers, but our craft was so
heavy that we accomplished less than two miles an hour. As the channel
grew wider and the current spread itself hither and thither over sand
banks, the bed became more shallow, and from time to time we grounded.
When this happened, the native rowers jumped into the water and pushed
or pulled the boat along. The farther down we went, and the more the
river widened, so much the more often did we take the bottom, and the
harder did we find it to get afloat again. Twelve miles below
Fontesvilla, a river called the Bigimiti comes in on the right, and at
its mouth we took on board a bold young English sportsman with the skin
of a huge lion. Below the confluence, where a maze of sand banks
encumbers the channel, we encountered a strong easterly breeze. The big
clumsy boat made scarcely any way against it, and stuck upon the sand so
often that the Kafirs, who certainly worked with a will, were more than
half the time in the water up to their knees, tugging and shoving to get
her off. Meanwhile the tide, what there was of it, was ebbing fast, and
the captain admitted that if we did not get across these shoals within
half an hour we should certainly lie fast upon them till next morning at
least, and how much longer no one could tell. It was not a pleasant
prospect, for we had no food except some biscuits and a tin of cocoa,
and a night on the Pungwe, with pestiferous swamps all round, meant
almost certainly an attack of fever. Nothing, however, could be done
beyond what the captain and the Kafirs were doing, so that suspense was
weighted by no sense of personal responsibility. We moved alternately
from stern to bow, and back from bow to stern, to lighten the boat at
one end or the other, and looked to windward to see from the sharp curl
of the waves whether the gusts which stopped our progress were
freshening further. Fortunately they abated. Just as the captain seemed
to be giving up hope--the only fault we had with him was that his face
revealed too plainly his anxieties--we felt ourselves glide off into a
deeper channel; the Kafirs jumped