After seeing to the distribution of corn, I proceeded across the ridge, and descending a stiff slope, almost cliffy in its upper part, after 154 feet of a descent, came to the dark sandy shore of the Salt Lake of Katwé, at a place where there were piles of salt-cakes lying about. The temperature of the water was 78·4° Fahrenheit; a narrow thread of sulphurous water indicated 84°. Its flavour was that of very strong brine.[32] Where the sand had been scooped cut into hollow beds, and the water of the lake had been permitted to flow in, evaporation had left a bed of crystal salt of rocky hardness, compacted and cemented together like coarse quartz. The appearance of these beds at a distance was like frozen pools. When not disturbed by the salt-gatherers, the shore is ringed around with _Ukindu_ palms, scrubby bush, reedy cane, euphorbia, aloetic plants; and at Mkiyo, a small village inhabited by salt-workers, there is a small grove of bananas, and a few fields of Indian corn and Eleusine coracana. Thus, though the lake has a singularly dead and lonely appearance, the narrow belt of verdure below the cliffy walls which encompass it, is a relief. Immediately behind this greenness of plants and bush, the precipitous slopes rise in a series of horizontal beds of grey compacted deposit, whitened at various places by thin incrustations of salt. There are also chalky-looking patches here and there, one of which, on being examined, proved to be of stalagmite. In one of these I found a large tusk of ivory, bones of small animals, teeth, and shells of about the size of cockles. There were several of these stalagmite beds around the lake. One remarkable peculiarity of the lake was the blood tints of its water, or of some deposit in it. On looking into the water I saw that this deposit floated, like congealed blood, on and below the surface. A man at my request stepped in, and at random; the water was up to his knees, and bending down soon brought up a solid cake of coarse-grained crystallised salt, and underneath it was a blood-red tinge. This reddish viscous stuff gives the lake, when looked at from the crest of Katwé ridge, a purple appearance, as though a crimson dye had been mixed with it. Hundreds of dead butterflies of various colours strewed the beach. There was not a fish seen in its waters, though its border seems to be a favourite haunt for herons, storks, pelican, egrets. The larger Salt Lake of Katwé, sometimes called Lake of Mkiyo, from the village of that name, is about three miles long, and ranges from half to three-quarters of a mile in width, and about three feet deep. The smaller lake is in a round grassy basin about two miles east, and is a round shallow pool half-a-mile across.