The horn sounded to get ready.  Shaw was lifted in his litter on the shoulders of his carriers.  My men formed two ranks; the flags were lifted; and between these two living rows, and under those bright streamers, which were to float over the waters of the Tanganika before he should see them again, Shaw was borne away towards the north; while we filed off to the south, with quicker and more elastic steps, as if we felt an incubus had been taken from us.

We ascended a ridge bristling with syenite boulders of massive size, appearing above a forest of dwarf trees.  The view which we saw was similar to that we had often seen elsewhere.  An illimitable forest stretching in grand waves far beyond the ken of vision—­ridges, forest-clad, rising gently one above another until they receded in the dim purple-blue distance —­with a warm haze floating above them, which, though clear enough in our neighbourhood, became impenetrably blue in the far distance.  Woods, woods, woods, leafy branches, foliage globes, or parachutes, green, brown, or sere in colour, forests one above another, rising, falling, and receding—­a very leafy ocean.  The horizon, at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than the rest conspicuous in its outlines against the translucent sky—­with this exception it is the same—­the same clear sky dropping into the depths of the forest, the same outlines, the same forest, the same horizon, day after day, week after week; we hurry to the summit of a ridge, expectant of a change, but the wearied eyes, after wandering over the vast expanse, return to the immediate surroundings, satiated with the eversameness of such scenes.  Carlyle, somewhere in his writings, says, that though the Vatican is great, it is but the chip of an eggshell compared to the star-fretted dome where Arcturus and Orion glance for ever; and I say that, though the grove of Central Park, New York, is grand compared to the thin groves seen in other great cities, that though the Windsor and the New Forests may be very fine and noble in England, yet they are but fagots of sticks compared to these eternal forests of Unyamwezi.

We marched three hours, and then halted for refreshments.  I perceived that the people were very tired, not yet inured to a series of long marches, or rather, not in proper trim for earnest, hard work after our long rest in Kwihara.  When we resumed our march again there were several manifestations of bad temper and weariness.  But a few good-natured remarks about their laziness put them on their mettle, and we reached Ugunda at 2 P.M. after another four hours’ spurt.