tried to resolve what was imaged but three miles away, and to ascertain whether it was tawny land, or grey water, or ashen sky, but all in vain. I needed but to hear the distant strains of a dirge to cause me to imagine that one of Kakuri’s canoes out yonder on the windless lake was a funereal barge, slowly gliding with its freight of dead explorers to the gloomy bourne from whence never an explorer returned. And oh! what might have been seen had we but known one of those marvellously clear days, with the deep purified azure and that dazzling transparency of ether so common to New York! We might have set some picture before the world from these never-known lands as never painter painted. We might have been able to show the lake, with its tender blue colour, here broadening nobly, there enfolding with its sparkling white arms clusters of tropic isles, or projecting long silvery tongues of blazing water into the spacious meadowy flats, curving everywhere in rounded bays, or extending along flowing shore-lines, under the shadows of impending plateau walls, and flotillas of canoes gliding over its bright bosom to give it life, and broad green bands of marsh grasses, palms, plantains, waving crops of sugar-cane, and umbrageous globes of foliage, to give beauty to its borders. And from point to point round about the compass we could have shown the irregularly circular line of lofty uplands, their proud hill bosses rising high into the clear air, and their mountainous promontories, with their domed crowns projected far into the basin, or receding into deep folds half enclosing fair valleys, and the silver threads of streams shooting in arrowy flights down the cliffy steeps; broad bands of vivid green grass, and spaces of deep green forest, alternating with frowning grey or white precipices, and far northward the horizon bounded by the Alps of Ruwenzori, a league in height above the lake, beautiful in their pure white garments of snow, entrancingly picturesque in their congregation of peaks and battalions of mountain satellites ranged gloriously against the crystalline sky. But alas! alas! In vain we turned our yearning eyes and longing looks in their direction. The Mountains of the Moon lay ever slumbering in their cloudy tents, and the lake which gave birth to the Albertine Nile remained ever brooding under the impenetrable and loveless mist. CHAPTER XXXII. THROUGH ANKORI TO THE ALEXANDRA NILE.