Western Mongolia, (west of the meridian of Lassa, and west of the point where the Tarine flows into Lake Lop,) upper Bokhara, and upper Toorkistan were formerly considered to be a highland district; this is now subject to doubt. We shall discuss this further on. Africa, too, has highlands of the first class, which, however, do not rise to the extreme height of the plateau of Thibet. As in Asia, so in central Africa, the old supposition of the existence of a plateau of colossal extent has been very much done away with by the more exact and critical modern investigations. The strip of territory lying between 4° and 10° north latitude has been demonstrated by Barth and Vogel to be destitute of highlands. The range of mountains announced as discovered by Mungo Park, and called the Kong Mountains, is proved to have no real existence, and of course his statement fails of verification that that range is the northern limit of an elevated central plateau. The peaks which really do rise in the Kong territory form no continuous ridge; they are mere isolated groups of moderate height. Between these groups the lowlands continue toward the south, in an unbroken level, for an immense distance. How far south of the equator the central African plateau begins, is yet unascertained, for the snow-tipped peaks of Kilimandjaro and Kenia, discovered by Rebmann and Krapf, in the parallel of Mombas, 1° to 3° south latitude, are of immense height, it is true, but they do not demonstrate the existence of a plateau of the first class there. They rise out of table-land about 2000 feet above the sea level, which Krapf explored in the year 1849. The Abyssinian plateau, on the contrary, takes rank among the most elevated on the globe. At 10° north latitude, south of the sources of the Blue Nile, lies Upper Abyssinia, or the kingdom of Shoa, with its capitals, Ankobar and Angolalla, 10,000 feet above the sea. Still farther to the north, in the ancient kingdom of Gondar, the German naturalist Rüppel ascertained the level of Lake Tzana to be 7000 feet above the ocean; to the southward of that the land rises to a still greater height, and northward of Gondar the plateau ascends to an elevation of 8000 feet, and mountains are met with 14,000 feet high. The terrace of Axaw on the east is 6650 feet above the Red Sea, which lies along its border. To the south of Shoa lie the highlands of Kaffa and Enarea. All travelers agree in the statement that the inhabitants of that region are light-complexioned; and Johnson draws from this the conclusion that the central plateau must rise to a height of over 10,000 feet to harbor people of a whiter hue than the dwellers of the less elevated localities. He saw a number of men of light complexion who came as far as from the fifth degree south latitude, not from mountain homes, but from high table-lands.