The traveller, by means of introductory letters to the Doyen of the Arab merchants at Kazeh, can always recruit his stock of country currency,--cloth, beads, and wire,--his requirements of powder and ball, and his supply of spices, comforts, and drugs, without which travel in these lands usually ends fatally. He will pay, it is true, about five times their market-value at Zanzibar: sugar, for instance, sells at its weight in ivory, or nearly one-third more than its weight in beads. But though the prices are exorbitant they preserve the buyer from greater evils, the expense of porterage, the risk of loss, and the trouble and annoyance of personally superintending large stores in a land where “vir” and “fur” are synonymous terms. And now comfortably housed within a stone-throw of my new friend Shaykh Snay bin Amir, I bade adieu for a time to the march, the camp, and the bivouac. Perhaps the reader may not be unwilling to hear certain details concerning the “road and the inn” in Eastern Africa; he is familiar from infancy with the Arab Kafilah and its host of litters and camels, horses, mules, and asses, but the porter-journeys in Eastern Africa have as yet escaped the penman’s pen. Throughout Eastern Africa made roads, the first test of progress in a people, are unknown. The most frequented routes are foot-tracks like goat-walks, one to two spans broad, trodden down during the travelling season by man and beast, and during the rains the path in African parlance “dies,” that is to say, it is overgrown with vegetation. In open and desert places four or five lines often run parallel for short distances. In jungly countries they are mere tunnels in thorns and under branchy trees, which fatigue the porter by catching his load. Where fields and villages abound they are closed with rough hedges, horizontal tree-trunks, and even rude stockades, to prevent trespassing and pilferage. Where the land is open, an allowance of one-fifth must be made for winding: in closer countries this must be increased to two-fifths or to one-half, and the traveller must exercise his judgment in distributing the marches between these two extremes. In Uzaramo and K’hutu the tracks run through tall grasses, which are laid by their own weight after rains, and are burned down during the hot seasons: they often skirt cultivated lands, which they are not allowed to enter, miry swamps are spanned, rivers breast-deep, with muddy bottoms and steep slippery banks, are forded, whilst deep holes, the work of rodents and insects, render them perilous to ridden cattle. In Usagara the gradients are surmounted either by beds of mountain torrents or by breasting steep and stony hills, mere ladders of tree-root and loose stones: laden animals frequently cannot ascend or descend them. The worst paths in this region are those which run along the banks of the many streams and rivulets, and which traverse the broken and thorny ground at the base of the hills.