The march through this waterless district was most monotonous, and a dangerous fever attacked me, which seemed to eat into my very vitals.  The wonders of Africa that bodied themselves forth in the shape of flocks of zebras, giraffes, elands, or antelopes, galloping over the jungleless plain, had no charm for me; nor could they serve to draw my attention from the severe fit of sickness which possessed me.  Towards the end of the first march I was not able to sit upon the donkey’s back; nor would it do, when but a third of the way across the wilderness, to halt until the next day; soldiers were therefore detailed to carry me in a hammock, and, when the terekeza was performed in the afternoon, I lay in a lethargic state, unconscious of all things.  With the night passed the fever, and, at 3 o’clock in the morning, when the march was resumed, I was booted and spurred, and the recognized mtongi of my caravan once more.  At 8 A.M. we had performed the thirty-two miles.  The wilderness of Marenga Mkali had been passed and we had entered Ugogo, which was at once a dreaded land to my caravan, and a Land of Promise to myself.

The transition from the wilderness into this Promised Land was very gradual and easy.  Very slowly the jungle thinned, the cleared land was a long time appearing, and when it had finally appeared, there were no signs of cultivation until we could clearly make out the herbage and vegetation on some hill slopes to our right running parallel with our route, then we saw timber on the hills, and broad acreage under cultivation—­and, lo! as we ascended a wave of reddish earth covered with tall weeds and cane, but a few feet from us, and directly across our path, were the fields of matama and grain we had been looking for, and Ugogo had been entered an hour before.

The view was not such as I expected.  I had imagined a plateau several hundred feet higher than Marenga Mkali, and an expansive view which should reveal Ugogo and its characteristics at once.  But instead, while travelling from the tall weeds which covered the clearing which had preceded the cultivated parts, we had entered into the depths of the taller matama stalks, and, excepting some distant hills near Mvumi, where the Great Sultan lived—­the first of the tribe to whom we should pay tribute—­the view was extremely limited.

However, in the neighbourhood of the first village a glimpse at some of the peculiar features of Ugogo was obtained, and there was a vast plain—­now flat, now heaving upwards, here level as a table, there tilted up into rugged knolls bristling with scores of rough boulders of immense size, which lay piled one above another as if the children of a Titanic race had been playing at house-building.  Indeed, these piles of rounded, angular, and riven rock formed miniature hills of themselves; and appeared as if each body had been ejected upwards by some violent agency beneath.  There was one of these in particular,