thing resembling that of a modern English wagonette, with windows
let into the side. Divans and cushions served for seats, while handsome
mirrors ornamented every spare corner, thus making of the roomy boat a
pleasant sleeping place, enabling its occupants to escape the pest of
mosquitos, incidental to the banks of the Zambesi.

Leaving Senna late, the party dropped lazily down the broad river. The
moonlight was pleasant enough; and from time to time Isabel's voice,
accompanying her guitar, rang out on the night air, while many a tale of
European and African life whiled away the night. Morning dawned; the
beams of the rising sun tipping the tamarind trees on the banks of the
Shire as the grapnel was dropped under the lee of a small island, just
where the river poured its waters into the Zambesi. The men were sent
ashore to pitch a tent on the right bank, and thus night was turned into
day on the bosom of the broad river. That afternoon the tent was
standing under the shelter of a group of mashango trees, its canvas
sides being raised to admit the air; and dinner, which, with its
delicacies of fish and vegetables, seemed a banquet to men who had for
so long been forced to live on venison, was served under its shade.
Several bottles of Bordeaux stood under there, too, swathed in wet
towels, just where the warm wind was the strongest, cooling by
evaporation. In front, the river, now sweeping onward, a broad majestic
stream, swollen by the waters of the Shire flowing from their sources in
the vast watershed of central Africa to the north. Groups of cocoa-nut
and palmyra grew here and there; the gum copal threw its shadow over the
glancing water; and large ebony trees of monstrous growth, thickly
covered with mantling creepers, bent over the stream. There, too, was
the singular palm tree, to be met with often on the Shire, which sends
up its stem, dividing many times, and each one forming a fan-like top of
curiously cut leaves, like giant fingers to the hand of a Cyclops; and
there was the prosopis tree, long known to the settler on the Shire's
banks for the fitness of its wood for boat-building. Beyond lay the
plain, one or two small kraals dotting it here and there, the patches of
sugar-cane, maize, and banana showing tokens of unusual industry and
civilisation. Cattle, too, were moving lazily about in the rich
pasturage, or standing grouped under the shade, while far away the blue
ridges of the Morumbala mountain