We descended the dividing ridge, which is also painfully steep, especially near the foot, and crossed the rolling hollow with its three chalybeate brooks, beyond which lay our destination.  Tuckey describes the hills between Boma and Nkulu as stony and barren, which is perhaps a little too strong.  The dark red clay soil, dried almost to the consistency of laterite, cannot be loosened by rain or sun, and in places it is hardened like that of Brazilian Porto Seguro, where the people complain that they cannot bury their dead.  All the uplands, however, grow grass which is sometimes ten to twelve feet tall, and in places there are shrubs and trees.  About Nkulu the highlands are rightly described as “steep hills of quartz, ferruginous earth, and syenite with fertile tops:”  rocks and stones are rare upon the plateaux:  they are rich enough to produce everything from wheat to coffee, and hardly a hundredth part is cultivated.  Thin and almost transparent lines of palms denote the several Banzas on the ridges, and in the valley are rock circles like magnified and prostrated Stonehenges.

The “termes arborum” is universal, and anthills form a prominent feature.  It has been remarked that these buildings are the most conspicuous architectural efforts of the country, and the Abbe Proyart observes that here more effectually than in any other land man ought to be sent to the ant school.  The material is of dark and sometimes black earth as in the Gaboon, and the shape is the umbrella, rarely double or pagoda-roofed.  The column may be twelve to eighteen inches high, and the diameter of the capital attains two feet:  I never saw, however, a “gigantic toadstool as high as a one-storied house."[FN#28] Nor are the mushroom tops now used as chafing-dishes.

The grateful tamarind grows everywhere, but nowhere so gloriously as on the lower elevations.  The only true sycomores which I saw were stunted specimens near the Yellala.  They contrasted poorly with the growth of the Ugogi Dhun, a noble patriarch, whose circle of shade under a vertical sun was 500 feet, and which I thought worthy of a portrait in “Lake Regions of Central Africa” (p. 195, vol. i.).  I need hardly warn the reader that, properly speaking, it is the “Sycamine which produces the fruit called Syconwrus or fig-mulberry;” but we apply the term “Sycomore” to the tree as well as to its fruit.

After three hours of actual marching (= seven miles) in an east-north-easterly direction, we ascended a path greasy with drizzle, parquetted by negro feet and infested with “drivers,” which now became troublesome.  It led to Banza Nkulu, a shabby settlement of unclean plantations and ragged huts of far inferior construction:  stacks of grass were piled upon the ground, and this new thatch was greatly wanted.  Here the lands of the “bush-men” begin:  instead of marching directly to the chief’s house, we sat in our wet clothes under a friendly wild fig.  The women flocked out at the cry of