We stayed in Taveta five days to give our animals rest after their trying marches, and to refresh ourselves with the indescribable charms of this country, which surpassed in pleasantness and tropical splendour, as well as in the grandeur of the mountain-ranges, anything we had hitherto seen. We wished also, with the assistance of the German agents settled here and in the neighbouring Moshi, to complete our equipment for the rest of the journey. These gentlemen, and not less the friendly natives, readily gave us information as to what wares were then in special demand in Masailand; and as we happened to have very few of a kind of blue pearls just then fashionable among the Dittos, and not a single piece of a sort of cotton cloth prized as a great novelty, we bought in Taveta several beast-loads of these valuables. In our excursions from Taveta we saw for the first time the Kilimanjaro mountain in all its overpowering majesty. Rising abruptly more than 13,000 feet above the surrounding high land, this double-peaked giant reaches an altitude of 19,000 feet above the sea, and bears upon its broad massive back a stretch of snow with which in impressiveness neither the glaciers of our European Alps nor, in a certain sense, those of the Andes and the Himalayas, can compare. For nowhere else upon our earth does nature present such a strong and sudden contrast between the most luxuriant and exuberant tropical vegetation and the horrid chilling waste of broken precipices and eternal ice as here in Equatorial Africa. The flora and fauna at the foot of the Himalayas, for example, are scarcely less gorgeous than in the wooded and well-watered country around Taveta; but while the snow-covered peaks of the mountain-range of Central Asia rise hundreds of miles away from the foot of the mountains, and it is therefore not possible to enjoy the two kinds of scenery together, heightened by contrast, here one can, from under the shade of a wild banana or mango-palm, count with a good telescope the unfathomable glacier-crevasses--so palpably near is the world of eternal ice to that of eternal summer. And what a summer!--a summer that preserves its richest treasures of beauty and fruitfulness without relaxing our nerves by its hot breath. These shady yet cheerful forests, these crystal streams leaping everywhere through the flower-perfumed land, these balmy airs which almost uninterruptedly float down from the near icefields, and on their way through the mountain-gorges and higher valleys get laden with the spicy breath of flowers,--all this must be seen and enjoyed in order to know what Taveta is.