On the next day we resumed our labour betimes: for a dreary and thirsty stage lay before us. Toiling through the sunshine of the hot waste I could not but remark the strange painting of the land around. At a distance the plain was bright-yellow with stubble, and brown-black with patches of leafless wintry jungle based upon a brick-dust soil. A closer approach disclosed colours more vivid and distinct. Over the ruddy plain lay scattered untidy heaps of grey granite boulders, surrounded and capped by tufts of bleached white grass. The copse showed all manner of strange hues, calabashes purpled and burnished by sun and rain, thorns of a greenish coppery bronze, dead trees with trunks of ghastly white, and gums (the blue-gum tree of the Cape?) of an unnatural sky-blue, the effect of the yellow outer pellicle being peeled off by the burning rays, whilst almost all were reddened up to a man’s height, by the double galleries, ascending and descending, of the white ants. Here too, I began to appreciate the extent of the nuisance, thorns. Some were soft and green, others a finger long, fine, straight and woody--they serve as needles in many parts of the country--one, a “corking pin,” bore at its base a filbert-like bulge, another was curved like a cock’s spur; the double thorns, placed dos-à-dos, described by travellers in Abyssinia and in the Cape Karroos, were numerous, the “wait-a-bit,” a dwarf sharply bent spine with acute point and stout foundation, and a smaller variety, short and deeply crooked, numerous and tenacious as fish-hooks, tore without difficulty the strongest clothing, even our woollen Arab “Abas,” and our bed-covers of painted canvas. Travelling through this broom-jungle and crossing grassy plains, over paths where the slides of elephants’ feet upon the last year’s muddy clay showed that the land was not always dry, we halted after 11 A.M. for about an hour at the base of a steep incline, apparently an offset from the now distant Rubeho Range. The porters would have nighted at the mouth of a small drain which, too steep for ascent, exposed in its rocky bed occasional sand-patches and deep pools; Kidogo, however, forced them forwards, declaring that if the asses drank of this “brackish water,” they would sicken and die. His assertion, suspected of being a “traveller’s tale,” was subsequently confirmed by the Arabs of Unyanyembe, who declared that the country people never water their flocks and herds below the hill; there may be poisonous vegetation in the few yards between the upper and the lower pools, but no one offered any explanation of the phenomenon.