On the 20th October we began the transit of the “Fiery Field,” whose long broad line of brown jungle, painted blue by the intervening air, had, since leaving K’hok’ho, formed our western horizon. The waste here appeared in its most horrid phase. The narrow goat-path serpentined in and out of a growth of poisonous thorny jungle, with thin, hard grass-straw, growing on a glaring white and rolling ground; the view was limited by bush and brake, as in the alluvial valleys of the maritime region, and in weary sameness the spectacle surpassed everything that we had endured in Marenga Mk’hali. We halted through the heat of the day at some water-pits in a broken course; and resuming our tedious march early in the afternoon, we arrived about sunset at the bed of a shallow nullah, where the pure element was found in sand-holes about five feet deep. On the 2nd day we reached the large Mabunguru Fiumara, a deep and tortuous gash of fine yellow quartzoze sand and sunburnt blocks of syenite: at times it must form an impassable torrent, even at this season of severe drought it afforded long pools of infiltrated rain-water, green with weeds and abounding with shell-fish, and with the usual description of Silurus. In the earlier morning the path passed through a forest already beautified by the sprouting of tender green leaves and by the blooming of flowers, amongst which was a large and strongly perfumed species of jasmine, whilst young grass sprouted from the fire-blackened remnants of the last year’s crop. Far upon the southern horizon rose distant hills and lines, blue, as if composed of solidified air, and mocking us by their mirage-likeness to the ocean. Nearer, the ground was diversified by those curious evidences of igneous action, which extend westward through eastern Unyamwezi, and northwards to the shores of the Nyanza Lake. These outcrops of gray granite and syenite are principally of two different shapes, the hog’s back and the turret. The former usually appears as a low lumpy dome of various dimensions; here a few feet long, there extending a mile and a half in diameter: the outer coat scales off under the action of the atmosphere, and in places it is worn away by a network of paths. The turret is a more picturesque and changing feature. Tall rounded blocks and conical or cylindrical boulders, here single, there in piles or ridges, some straight and stiff as giant ninepins, others split as if an alley or a gateway passed between them, rise abruptly and perpendicularly almost without foundationary elevation, cleaving the mould of a dead plain, or--like gypseous formations, in which the highest boulders are planted upon the lowest and broadest bases--they bristle upon a wave of dwarfish rocky hill. One when struck was observed to give forth a metallic clink, and not a few, balanced upon points, reminded me of the tradition-bearing rocking stones. At a distance in the forest, the