On the 15th September, after sending forward the luggage, and waiting as agreed upon for the return of the porters to carry my companion, I set out about noon, through hot sunshine tempered by the cool hill-breeze. Emerging from the grassy hollow, the path skirted a well-wooded hill and traversed a small savannah, overgrown with stunted straw and hedged in by a bushy forest. At this point massive trees, here single, there in holts and clumps, foliaged more gloomily than churchyard yews, and studded with delicate pink-flowers, rose from the tawny sun-burned expanse around, and defended from the fiery glare braky rings of emerald shrubbery, sharply defined as if by the forester’s hand. The savannah extended to the edge of a step which, falling deep and steep, suddenly disclosed to view, below and far beyond the shaggy ribs and the dark ravines and folds of the foreground, the plateau of Ugogo and its Eastern desert. The spectacle was truly impressive. The vault above seemed “an ample æther,” raised by its exceeding transparency higher than it is wont to be. Up to the curved rim of the western horizon, lay, burnished by the rays of a burning sun, plains rippled like a yellow sea by the wavy reek of the dancing air, broken towards the north by a few detached cones rising island-like from the surface, and zebra’d with long black lines, where bush and scrub and strip of thorn jungle, supplanted upon the watercourses, trending in mazy network southwards to the Rwaha River, the scorched grass and withered canes-stubbles, which seemed to be the staple growth of the land. There was nothing of effeminate or luxuriant beauty, nothing of the flush and fulness characterising tropical Nature, in this first aspect of Ugogo. It appeared what it is, stern and wild,--the rough nurse of rugged men,--and perhaps the anticipation of dangers and difficulties ever present to the minds of those preparing to endure the waywardness of its children, contributed not a little to the fascination of the scene. After lingering for a few minutes upon the crest of the step, with feelings which they will understand who after some pleasant months--oases in the grim deserts of Anglo-Indian life--spent among the tree-clad heights, the breezy lakes, and the turfy valleys of the Himalayas and the Neilgherries, sight from their last vantage-ground the jaundiced and fevered plains below, we scrambled down an irregular incline of glaring red clay and dazzling white chalk, plentifully besprinkled with dark-olive silex in its cherty crust. Below the descent was a level space upon a long ridge, where some small villages of Wasagara had surrounded themselves with dwarf fields of holcus, bajri, and maize. A little beyond this spot, called the “Third Rubeho,” we found a comfortless kraal on uneven ground, a sloping ledge sinking towards a deep ravine.