An hour after midnight the loading commenced, and the steep rocky hill having been surmounted by a path strewed with loose stones, a terrace of slow ascent, presenting the same dreary appearance of rocks and lava boulders, continued during the residue of the moon's reign. At break of day, however, the aspect of the country began rapidly to improve. Gaining the higher and more salubrious level of Gulamo, the bare sterile land, strewed with black blocks of lava which tore the feet with their jagged edges, was fast giving place to sandy plains covered with dry yellow grass--a most welcome prospect for the exhausted cattle. Heretofore, saving in the wadys, no tree had been seen except small stunted leafless acacias, few and far between, and scarcely deserving of the name. Several small ravines were now choked with continuous groves, and a mountain stream termed Chekaito, which rises in the country of the Eesah, and in the rainy season disembogues into the lake at Aussa, was thickly clothed on both sides with green belts of tamarisk, wild caper, and other wood, overhung with creeping parasites, and affording food and shelter to birds. The pensile nests of the long-tailed loxia depended from the boughs; and whilst the stems, covered with drift to the height of fifteen feet, gave evidence of a headlong course during the rains, water, even at this season, was here and there to be obtained. Heaps of loose stones thrown carelessly together, mark in almost every direction the spot where the victim lies who has been cut off by some cold-blooded miscreant--melancholy monuments connected each with a tale of assassination. But on the banks of the Chekaito many acres of ground are covered with stones of memorial, such as were raised over Absalom, and over Achan the king of Ai, each surrounded by a circular cordon which bears the stamp of high antiquity, and has evidently witnessed the passage of ages. These sepulchres are said to cover the bones of the heroes who fell in a battle fought on the spot at the period that the country was first wrested from the shepherds. "Hai," the designation of the spot itself, is applied also to the entire surrounding district, which is stated to have been formerly peopled by the Gittereza, a gigantic pastoral race, who, under the chief Sango, were at enmity with all the surrounding tribes, but are now extinct.