After the ascent of the escarpment they camped two nights in succession in a strange region suggestive of the Moon’s surface as revealed by a powerful telescope. There were the crumbling sides of craters, the cones of extinct volcanoes—extinct, perhaps; but sometimes a strange and ominous-looking white smoke or gassy vapour issued from cracks in the ground and through veins in the obsidian rocks. Vegetation was very scanty—a few yellow stalks of bamboo in the hollows; and water was scarce enough to cause anxiety and limit washing to a minimum. Yet if they could cross this dry belt of naked rock and barren mountain and the possibly waterless plain that lay in front of them, to the east there was a promise of better things. Far away, a blue pyramid seen against the morning sun, was Mount Meru, one of the great, unmistakable landmarks of East Africa. It towered fifteen thousand feet into the sky and when the sun turned to the zenith and the west they could see the peak of the pyramid was white with snow. And behind Meru in the early morning or in the early evening there came into view something at first unbelievable, a floating island in the sky, a Laputa: the great snowy dome of Kibô.... A few days of rough, silent travel—seeing no natives and very few birds and beasts—and they were in the Kisongo plains. Here it was less arid, and beneath the burnt stems of the old grass the fresh green grass was springing. The occasional scrubby trees and bushes were putting forth fresh leaves, sometimes quite red in colour, or even purplish black. Big game swarmed round them unafraid of man, inclined even to be insolent. Rhinoceroses charged the caravan and both Lucy and Roger had narrow escapes of being tossed on their horns, while Lucy was twice flung from her donkey when it bolted with terror at a tangent from the unexpected rush of the squealing monster. A Nyamwezi porter was gored and trampled, his load smashed and the caravan disorganized. Roger laid low one rhinoceros; and then, water being near, they spent all the rest of that day and the next cutting up its flesh, smoking it, drying it in the sun, and making of it a food provision greatly wanted by the porters.