acicular mountains; tall, gravelly, waterless, and lying about three days’ journey beyond the screen of wooded hill.  It is probably sheltered to some extent from the damp sea-breeze, and thus to the east there would be a “lee-land,” dry, healthy and elevated, which, corresponding with Ugogo on the Zanzibar-Tanganyika line, would account for the light complexions of the people.  Early on the morning of Thursday, April 17th, the “Eliza” was lying off Mr. R. B. N. Walker’s factory, and I was again received with customary hospitality by Mr. Hogg.

These two short trips gave me a just measure of the comparative difficulties in travelling through Eastern and Western Africa, and to a certain extent accounted for the huge vacuum which disfigures the latter, a few miles behind the seaboard.  The road to Unyamwezi, for instance, has been trodden for centuries; the people have become trained porters; they look forward annually to visiting the coast, and they are accustomed to the sight of strangers, Arabs and others.  If war or blood-feud chance to close one line, the general interests of the interior open another.  But in this section of Africa there is no way except from village to village, and a blood-feud may shut it for months.  The people have not the habit of dealing with the foreigner, whom they look upon as a portent, a walking ghost, an ill-omened apparition.  Porterage is in embryo, no scale of payment exists; and no dread of cutting off a communication profitable to both importer and exporter prevents the greedy barbarian plundering the stranger.  Captain Speke and I were fortunate in being the first whites who seriously attempted the Lake Region; our only obstacles were the European merchants at Zanzibar; the murder of M. Maizan, although a bad example to the people, had been so punished as to render an immediate repetition of the outrage improbable.  I say immediate, for, shortly after our return, the unfortunate Herr Roscher was killed at the Hisonguni village, near the Rufuma River, without apparent reason. [FN#22]

But M. du Chaillu had a very different task, and as far as he went he did it well.  His second expedition, in which an accidental death raised the country against him, was fortunately undertaken by a man in the prime of youth and strength; otherwise he must have succumbed to a nine hours’ run, wounded withal.  In East Africa when one of Lieutenant Cameron’s “pagazis” happened to kill a native, the white man was mulcted only in half his cloth.

On the other hand, I see no reason why these untrodden lines should be pronounced impossible, as a writer in the “Pall Mall” has lately done, deterring the explorer from work which every day would cover new ground.  The Gaboon is by no means a bad point de depart, whence the resolute traveller, with perseverance (Anglice time), a knowledge of the coast language, and good luck might penetrate into the heart (proper) of Africa, and abolish the white blot which still