By Kidogo’s suggestion I had preferred the middle line through the hundred miles of dreaded Ugogo: it was the beaten path, and infested only by four Sultans, namely: 1. Myandozi of Kifukuru. 2. Magomba of Kanyenye. 3. Maguru-Mafupi of K’hok’ho; and 4. Kibuya of Mdaburu. On the 1st October, 1857, we left the Ziwa late in the morning, and after passing through the savannahs and the brown jungles of the lower levels, where giraffe again appeared, the path crested a wave of ground and debouched upon the table-land of Ugogo. The aspect was peculiar and unprepossessing. Behind still towered in sight the Delectable Mountains of Usagara, mist-crowned and robed in the lightest azure, with streaks of a deep plum-colour, fronting the hot low land of Marenga Mk’hali, whose tawny face was wrinkled with lines of dark jungle. On the north was a tabular range of rough and rugged hill, above which rose three distant cones pointed out as the haunts of the robber Wahumba: at its base was a deep depression, a tract of brown brush patched with yellow grass, inhabited only by the elephant, and broken by small outlying hillocks. Southwards scattered eminences of tree-crowned rock rose a few yards from the plain which extended to the front, a clearing of deep red or white soil, decayed vegetation based upon rocky or sandy ground, here and there thinly veiled with brown brush and golden stubbles: its length, about four miles, was studded with square villages, and with the stately but grotesque calabash. This giant is to the vegetable what the elephant is to the animal world:--the Persians call it the “practice-work of nature”--its disproportionate conical bole rests upon huge legs exposed to view by the washing away of the soil, and displays excrescences which in pious India would merit a coat of vermilion. From the neck extend gigantic gnarled arms, each one a tree, whose thinnest twig is thick as a man’s finger, and their weight causes them to droop earthwards, giving to the outline the shape of a huge dome. In many parts the unloveliness of its general appearance is varied by the wrinkles and puckerings which, forming by granulation upon the oblongs where the bark has been removed for fibre, give the base the appearance of being chamfered and fluted; and often a small family of trunks, four or five in number, springs from the same root. At that season all were leafless; at other times they are densely foliaged, and contrasting with their large timber and with their coarse fleshy leaf, they are adorned with the delicatest flowers of a pure virgin-white, which, opening at early dawn, fade and fall before eventide. The babe-tree issues from the ground about one foot in diameter: in Ugogo, however, all those observed were of middle age. The young are probably grubbed up to prevent their encumbering the ground, and when decayed enough to be easily felled, they are converted into firewood. By the side of these dry and leafless