On the 18th September, a final march of four hours placed us in the plains of Ugogo. Leaving the place of the last night’s bivouac, we pursued the line of the Dungomaro, occasionally quitting it where boulders obstructed progress, and presently we came to its lower bed, where perennial rills, exuding from its earth-walls and trickling down its side, veiled the bottom with a green and shrubby perfumed vegetation. As the plain was neared, the difficulties increased, and the scenery became curious. The Dungomaro appeared a large crevasse in lofty rocks of pink and gray granite, streaked with white quartz, and pudding’d with greenstone and black horneblend; the sole, strewed with a rugged layer of blocks, was side-lined with narrow ledges and terraces of brown humus, supporting dwarf cactus and stunted thorny trees; whilst high above towered stony wooded peaks, closing in the view on all sides. Farther down the bed huge boulders, sunburnt, and stained by the courses of rain-torrents, rose, perpendicularly as walls, to the height of one hundred and one hundred and twenty feet, and there the flooring was a sheet or slide of shiny and shelving rock, with broad fissures, and steep drops, and cups, “potholes,” baths, and basins, filed and cut by the friction of the gravelly torrents, regularly as if turned with the lathe. Where water lay, deep mud and thick clumps of grass and reed forced the path to run along the ledges at the sides of the base. Gradually, as the angle of inclination became more obtuse, the bed widened out, the tall stone-walls gave way to low earth-banks clad with gum-trees; pits, serving as wells, appeared in the deep loose sand, and the Dungomaro, becoming a broad, smooth Fiumara, swept away verging southwards into the plain. Before noon, I sighted from a sharp turn in the bed our tent pitched under a huge sycomore, on a level step that bounded the Fiumara to the right. It was a pretty spot in a barren scene, grassy, and grown with green mimosas, spreading out their feathery heads like parachutes, and shedding upon the ground a filmy shade that fluttered and flickered in the draughty breeze.