Returning to his generous host, he asked for guides to take him to the hot springs of Mtagata, the healing properties of which he had heard of far and wide from the natives. These were cheerfully given, and after a march of two days he reached them. Here he was met by an astonishing growth of vegetation. Plants of an almost infinite variety, covered the ground, growing so thick and crowding each other so closely, that they became a matted mass--the smaller ones stifled by the larger--and out of which trees shot up an arrow's-flight into the air, with "globes of radiant green foliage upon their stem-like crowns." He found a crowd of diseased persons here, trying the effect of the water. Naked men and women were lying promiscuously around in the steaming water, half-asleep and half-cooked, for the water showed a temperature of one hundred and twenty-nine degrees. The springs were, however, of different temperature. The hottest one issued from the base of a rocky hill, while four others, twenty degrees cooler, came bubbling up out of black mud, and were the favorites of the invalids. Stanley camped here three days, and bathed in the water and drank it, but could perceive no effect whatever on his system. Returning to his friend Rumaniki, he prepared to start on his journey south to Lake Tanganika, and finish its explorations. Having discovered that the Kagera River formed a lake eighty miles long, and was a powerful stream a long distance from its mouth, he resolved, as it flowed from the south, to follow it up and try to find its source. A broad wilderness lay before him, the extent of which he did not accurately know, and he packed ten days' provisions on the shoulders of each man of the expedition, and bidding the soft-voiced pagan king, by whom he had been treated so kindly, a warm good-bye, he entered the forest and kept along the right bank of the stream. This was the 27th of March, and for six days he marched through an uninhabited wilderness, with nothing to break the monotony of the journey. At the end of that time he came to the borders of Karagwe and to the point where the Akanyaru River entered the Kagera. He dared not explore this river, for the natives that inhabit both banks are wild and fierce, having a deadly hatred of all strangers. They are like the long-legged race of Bumbireh, and he did not care to come in collision with them. They possess many cattle, and if one sickens or dies, they do not attribute it to accident, but believe it has been bewitched, and search the country through to find the stranger who has done it, and if he is found, _he dies_.