Soon, however, I needed to rest more and more frequently, stopping at last to pause and pant in every patch of thin shade. Then my Tamil boy and the head-collector proposed that they should go on alone and return to meet me as soon as water was found. This I acceded to, and so was left completely alone. In this condition, hobbling along painfully, resting continually, and with foolish persistency painting, to my thirsting imagination, vivid pictures of cooling draughts, I toiled through the sultry afternoon, persisting doggedly in my determination not to give in till I was within measurable distance from water. Sometimes I did give way—stretched myself languidly under the faint patchwork of shade that some meagre bush afforded, and lay there during some minutes, vainly trying to moisten my dried lips with my parched tongue, and hoping that with the approach of night and its dewy coolness I might overcome this raging thirst. Then the little lithe lizards would come and look at me with their heads on one side, and their bright eyes scanning me half-mockingly; an irate ant would nip my hot hand, which I had abandoned as if it no longer belonged to me, and carelessly placed on an unconsidered ant-hill, till at length, weary of my unrestful repose, I would stagger to my feet, and limp on for a few minutes in agony, as you always do when you have given blistered feet a brief rest and then commence walking again. I will spare you a further recital of these very ordinary, everyday African sufferings, so interesting to me to ponder over now that I am writing about them in England, where thirst is almost desirable from the many pleasant ways there are of quenching it. I will suppose that I have stumbled over a rocky path in the waning daylight, toiled on the last dreary miles of the journey under a rising moon, and at length found myself amid a strange thicket of thorny trees and weird euphorbias at the base of the hill of Maungu. In the camping-place where most caravans stop, I see a small fire burning, a man sitting, and a man lying down. The former is one of my natural history collectors and the other my Indian servant, Virapan, who has fainted. I question the collector, a man called Athmani, and he tells me the water lies in a cup-shaped basin at the summit of the hill (which is nearly 5000 feet high), and that his companion and helpmate, Mabruki, has gone to get some. Fancy when you have walked thirty-two miles for a drink finding your cistern lies some three or four thousand feet above you!