The soil now became swampy, yet only the more filled with animal existence.  Le ado, (the White Water,) a lake which they skirted, of two miles’ diameter, was the haunt of countless wild-fowl, geese, mallards, teal, herons, flamingoes.  A party of Bedouin women deposed to having seen another “party” of elephants taking a bath in the spot half an hour before, and the prints of their huge feet in the moist sands corroborated the testimony.  Hideously withered women followed the march of the mission, carrying curds, and covered over with marsh-flies.  Above, vast flights of locusts, which had stripped the coast, were pouring in towards Abyssinia.  “They quite darkened the air” where the caravan halted; and above them again were a host of adjutant birds, sometimes bursting down through the mass, and then stooping to the ground, and stalking along to devour the killed and wounded.  This is the land, too, of the hurricane.  Nature is queen or tyrant here; the thunder tears the sensorium; the lightning burns out the eyes; the rain is a cataract; the hall is a continued volley of ice; the clouds stoop to earth, and bury the daylight like a shroud; the rivers become torrents; the dry plain becomes first a swamp, and then a sea.  Tents and tarpaulins are useless to keep out the deluge from above, or are beaten down by its weight on the heads of the unfortunates who trust to them for shelter, until at length the caravan, stripped of all covering, has no resource but to bide the pelting of the pitiless storm, and, shivering and shelterless, wait until the hurricane has howled itself away.

At length they reached the city of Furri, loaded, for the thirty-fifth time, with the baggage of the British embassy.  The caravan, escorted by a detachment of three hundred matchlock men, with flutes playing, and muskets echoing, and the heads of the warriors decorated with white plumes, on the 16th July entered the frontier town of the kingdom of Efat.  Clusters of conical-roofed houses, covering the sides of twin hills, here presented the first permanent habitations that had greeted the eye since leaving the sea-coast—­rude and ungainly, but right welcome signs of transition from depopulated waste to the abodes of man.  The African seems a robber by nature, and the sight of the bales and boxes excited the national propensity in a most violent degree.  Even the royal ministers and courtiers seem to have felt a passion for looking into those prohibited treasures, which evidently tempted their virtue in a most perilous degree.  Meanwhile a special messenger arrived, bearing reiterated compliments from the Negoos, (king,) with a horse and a mule from the royal stud, attired in the peculiar trappings which belong to majesty.  Those animals awoke all the loyal curiosity of the people.  At the sight women and girls, enveloped in blood-red shifts, who had thronged to stare at the strangers, burst into a scream of acclamation.  A group of hooded widows