The next day was a forced halt at Cha K’henge. Of two asses that had been left behind one was recovered, the other was abandoned to its fate. The animals purchased at Zanzibar were falling off visibly in condition. Accustomed to a kind of grass which nowhere grows upon these sunburnt hills, they had regular feeds of holcus, but that, as Said bin Salim expressed himself, was only coffee to them. The Wanyamwezi asses, however, managed to pick a sustenance from the rushes and from the half-burned stubbles, when fortunate enough to find any. Sickness again declared itself. Shahdad the Baloch bellowed like a bull with fever pains, Gaetano complained that he was suffering tortures generally, two of the Wanyamwezi were incapacitated by the symptoms preliminary to small-pox from carrying their packs, and a third was prostrated by ague. We started, however, on the next day for a long march which concluded, the passage of the “Tamarind Hills.” Crossing a country broken by dry nullahs, or rather ditches, we traversed a seam of forest with a deep woody ravine on the right, and twice unpacked and reloaded the asses, who lay down instead of breasting the difficulties: a muddy swamp full of water-courses, and the high earth-banks of the Rufuta a Fiumara, here dry during the hot season. Thence, winding along a hill-flank, to avoid a bend in the bed, the path plunged into the sole of the Rufuta. This main-drain of the lower gradients carries off, according to the guides, the waters of the high ground around it into the Mgeta. The bed, which varies from three to sixteen feet in breadth, serpentines abruptly through the hills: its surface is either deep sand or clay, sopped with water, which near the head becomes a thin fillet, ankle-deep, now sweet, then salt: the mud is tinged in places with a solution of iron, showing, when stagnant, prismatic and iridescent tints. Where narrowest, the tall grasses of the banks meet across the gut, which, after a few yards of short, sharp winding, opens out again. The walls are in some parts earth, in others blocks of gray syenite, which here and there encumber the bed: on the right, near the end of the stage, the hills above seem to overhang the Fuimara in almost perpendicular masses of sandstone, from whose chinks spring the gnarled roots of tall trees corded with creepers, overgrown with parasites; and hung with fruits like footballs, dangling from twines sometimes thirty feet long. The lower banks, where not choked with rush, are overgrown with the brightest verdure, and with the feathery bamboo rising and falling before the wind. The corpses of porters were even more numerous than on the yester: our Muslems passed them with averted faces and with the low “la haul!” of disgust, and a decrepid old Mnyamwezi porter gazed at them and wept for himself. About 2 P.M., turning abruptly from the bed, we crawled up a short stony steep strewed with our asses and their loads; and reaching the summit of a