While I write my Diary of this day’s proceedings, I tell my servant to lay out my new flannel suit, to oil my boots, to chalk my helmet, and fold a new puggaree around it, that I may make as presentable an appearance as possible before the white man with the grey beard, and before the Arabs of Ujiji; for the clothes I have worn through jungle and forest are in tatters.  Good-night; only let one day come again, and we shall see what we shall see.

 November 10th.  Friday.—­The 236th day from Bagamoyo on the Sea,
 and the 51st day from Unyanyembe.  General direction to Ujiji,
 west-by-south.  Time of march, six hours.

It is a happy, glorious morning.  The air is fresh and cool.  The sky lovingly smiles on the earth and her children.  The deep woods are crowned in bright vernal leafage; the water of the Mkuti, rushing under the emerald shade afforded by the bearded banks, seems to challenge us for the race to Ujiji, with its continuous brawl.

We are all outside the village cane fence, every man of us looking as spruce, as neat, and happy as when we embarked on the dhows at Zanzibar, which seems to us to have been ages ago—­we have witnessed and experienced so much.

 “Forward!”

“Ay Wallah, ay Wallah, bana yango!” and the lighthearted braves stride away at a rate which must soon bring us within view of Ujiji.  We ascend a hill overgrown with bamboo, descend into a ravine through which dashes an impetuous little torrent, ascend another short hill, then, along a smooth footpath running across the slope of a long ridge, we push on as only eager, lighthearted men can do.

In two hours I am warned to prepare for a view of the Tanganika, for, from the top of a steep mountain the kirangozi says I can see it.  I almost vent the feeling of my heart in cries.  But wait, we must behold it first.  And we press forward and up the hill breathlessly, lest the grand scene hasten away.  We are at last on the summit.  Ah! not yet can it be seen.  A little further on—­just yonder, oh! there it is—­a silvery gleam.  I merely catch sight of it between the trees, and—­but here it is at last!  True—­the Tanganika! and there are the blue-black mountains of Ugoma and Ukaramba.  An immense broad sheet, a burnished bed of silver—­lucid canopy of blue above—­lofty mountains are its valances, palm forests form its fringes!  The Tanganika!—­Hurrah! and the men respond to the exultant cry of the Anglo-Saxon with the lungs of Stentors, and the great forests and the hills seem to share in our triumph.

 “Was this the place where Burton and Speke stood, Bombay, when they
 saw the lake first?”