The koroos are arid deserts in the dry season, but soon after the rains they are covered with verdure and a splendid flora. The maritime plains partake of the same temporary aridity, though a large portion is rich in cereal productions, vineyards, fruits, and pasture. The most inland of the parallel ranges, about the 20th meridian east, is 10,000 feet high, and, though it sinks to some groups of hills at its eastern extremity, it rises again, about the 27th meridian, in a truly alpine and continuous chain—the Quotlamba mountains, which follow the northerly direction of Natal, and are continued in the Lupata range of hills, 80 miles inland, through Zanguebar. At Natal the coast is grassy, with clumps of trees, like an English park. The Zambeze, and other streams from the table-land, refresh the plains on the Mozambique Channel and Zanguebar, where, though some parts are marshy and covered with mangroves, groves of palm-trees adorn the plains, which yield prodigious quantities of grain, and noble forests cover the mountains; but from 4° N. latitude to Cape Guardafuï is a continued desert. There is also a barren tract at the southern end of the Lupata chain, where gold is found in masses and grains on the surface and in the watercourses, which tempted the Portuguese to make settlements on these unwholesome coasts. The island of Madagascar, with its magnificent range of mountains, full of tremendous precipices, and covered with primeval forests, is parallel to the African coast, and only separated from it by the Mozambique Channel, 300 miles broad, so it may be presumed that it rose from the deep at the same time as the Lupata chain. The contrast between the eastern and western coasts of South Africa is very great. The escarped bold mountains round the Cape of Good Hope, and its rocky coast, which extends a short way along the Atlantic to the north, are succeeded by ranges of sandstone of small elevation, which separate the internal sandy desert from the equally parched sandy shore. The terraced dip of the Atlantic coast for 900 miles, between the Orange River and Cape Negro, has not a drop of fresh water. At Cape Negro, ranges of mountains, separated by long level tracts, begin, and make a semicircular bend into the interior, leaving plains along the coast 140 miles broad. In Benguela these plains are healthy and cultivated; farther north there are monotonous grassy savannahs, and forests of gigantic trees. The ground, in many places saturated with water, bears a tangled crop of mangroves and tall reeds, which even cover the shoals along the coasts; but pestilential vapours hang over them, never dissipated by a breeze. The country of Calbongos is the highest land on the coast, where a magnificent group of mountains, covered almost to their tops with large timber, lie not far inland. The low plains of Biafra and Benin, west of them, and especially the delta of the Niger, consist entirely of swamps loaded with rank vegetation.