On the next morning, after a march of an hour and a half along a tolerably good path, we emerged in front of an extensive clearing of about 240 acres. The trees were but recently cut. This marked the advent of a powerful tribe, or a late removal to new ground of old settlers of some numerical force, resolved upon securing many creature comforts. A captive woman of the Waburu led the way through the middle of this wide abattis, the very sight of which was appalling. An hour later we had crossed this, not without bruised shins and much trembling, and the path then led up an easy ascent up a prolonged span of a hill. The hollows on either side of it showed prodigious groves of plantains and many gardens, ill-kept, devoted to herbs and gourds. Within thirty minutes from the summit of the ascent we had reached an altitude that promised to give us shortly a more extended view than any we had been lately accustomed to, and we pressed gladly upwards, and soon entered a series of villages that followed the slope. A village of these parts always gave us a highway well trodden, from forty to sixty feet wide; in a series of this type of villages we should soon be able to pace a mile. We had passed through several fine separate long blocks of low structures, when the foremost of the advance guard was seen running swiftly down to meet me. He asked me to look towards the sunrise, and, turning my eyes in that direction, they were met by the gratifying sight of a fairly varied scene of pasture-land and forest, of level champaigns and grassy slopes of valleys and hills, rocky knolls and softly rounded eminences, a veritable "land of hills and valleys, that drinketh the rain of heaven." That the open country was well watered was indicated by the many irregular lines of woods which marked the courses of the streams, and by the clumps of trees, whose crowns just rose above their sloping banks. The great forest in which we had been so long buried, and whose limits were in view, appeared to continue intact and unbroken to the N.E., but to the E. of it was an altogether different region of grassy meads and plains and hills, freely sprinkled with groves, clusters, and thin lines of trees up to certain ranges of hills that bounded the vision, and at whose base I knew must be the goal whither we had for months desired to reach. [Illustration: VIEW OF MOUNT PISGAH FROM THE EASTWARD.] This, then, was the long promised view and the long expected exit out of gloom! Therefore I called the tall peak terminating the forested ridge, of which the spur whereon we stood was a part, and that rose two miles E. of us to a height of 4600 feet above the sea, Pisgah,--Mount Pisgah,--because, after 156 days of twilight in the primeval forest, we had first viewed the desired pasturelands of Equatoria.