Sr.  Joao Soares Caldeira, C.E., kindly asked me to join his party, which started early on August 19.  All rode the tipoia, a mere maca or hammock sadly heating to the back, but handier than the manchila:  the bearers wore loose waistbelts, with a dozen small sheep’s bells on the crupper, intended to proclaim our importance, and supposed to frighten away wild beasts.  These gentry often require the stimulus of “ndokwe” (go on), but seldom the sedative of “malemba” (gently) or “quinga” (stop).  The “boi-cavallo,” the riding bull (not ox) of the interior, which costs about L4, is never used in these fashionable localities.  I failed to remark the line of trenches supposed to defend the land-side, but I did remark the “maiangas,” said to be indigo vats made by the Jesuits.  After a hot depression we ascended a rough zigzag, and halting we enjoyed a charming view of St. Paul.  The domed Morro concealing the squalid lower town was crowned with once lordly buildings—­cathedral, palace, treasury, and fort; the colours of the ground-swell were red and white, with here and there a dot of green; and the blue sea rose in its loveliness beyond the hill horizon.  For a whole league we were in the region of “arimos,” or outside farms, where villages, villas, and plantations, threaded by hot and sandy lanes with hedges of green euphorbia, showed the former prosperity of the country.  Beyond it the land forms, as in Yoruba, lines of crescents bulging west or seaward, quartz and pebbles showing here and there an old true coast.

After a five hours’ ride we reached Cavua, the half-way house, where breakfast had been sent on; the habitations are wretched thatches, crowded with pigs and mosquitoes.  Clearings had all ended, and the red land formed broken waves of poor soil, almost nude of vegetation at this mid-winter of the tropics, except thickets of “milk plant” and forests of quadrangular cactus; the latter are quaint as the dragon-tree, some twenty feet tall and mostly sun-scorched to touchwood.  The baobab (adansonia) is apparently of two kinds, the “Imbundeiro,” hung with long-stringed calabashes, which forms swarming-places for bees; and the “Aliconda” (Nkondo), whose gourd is almost sessile, and whose bark supplies fibre for cloth and ropes.  The haskul or big-aloe of Somali-land was not absent, and, amongst other wild fruits, I saw scattered over the ground the husks of a strychnine, like the east African species.  Deer, hares, and partridges are spoken of in these solitudes, but they must be uncommonly hard to find at such a season.

About three hours after leaving Cavua were spent upon this high, dry, and healthy desert, when suddenly we sighted the long reaches of the Cuanza River, sharply contrasting, like the Nile, with the tawny yellow grounds about its valley.  A steep descent over water-rolled pebbles showed the old bank; the other side, far and blue, gave a goodly breadth of five miles; then we plunged into the green selvage of the