Meantime, two more large canoes came up, also bold and confident, for they had not yet been taught a lesson. These new-comers insisted that we should visit their king Kamoydah. We begged to be excused. They became still more urgent in their request. We said it was impossible; they were strangers, and not very well behaved; if they wished to barter with us, they could load their canoes and come to Ngevi, where we would be happy to exchange beads or cloth for their articles. Three other canoes were now seen approaching. We sat, however, extremely still, patient, and placable, and waited for them. The united voices of the 130 natives made a terrible din, but we endured it with saintly meekness and the fortitude of stoics—for a period. We bore the storm of entreaties mixed with rude menace until instinct warned me that it was becoming dangerous. I then delivered some instructions to the boat’s crew, and, nodding to the shore, affected to surrender with an indifferent grace. They became suddenly silent. We lifted the stone anchor, and took to our oars, steering to the broken water, ruffled by the nor’-wester, beyond the shelter of the island, convoyed by the six canoes. We accompanied them some hundreds of yards, and then, suddenly hoisting sail, swept by them like an arrow. We preferred the prospect of the lone watery expanse to the company of the perverse inebriates of Ugamba. We continued sailing for half an hour, and as it was then near sunset, dropped anchor in 75 feet of water. The wind, which had swept in strong gusts from the north-west, suddenly fell, for in the north-east the aspect of the sky had long been threatening. Clouds surged up in thick masses from that direction, and cast a gloom over the wood-clothed slopes and crests of Usuguru, which became almost as black as a velvet pall, while the lake grew as quiet as though vitrified into glass. Soon the piled up cloud-mass grew jagged, and a portentous zigzag line of deep sable hue ran through its centre, from which the storm seemed to issue. I requested the crew to come farther aft, and, fastening a double rope to the stone anchor, prepared every mug and baler for the rain with which we were threatened. The wind then fell, as though from above, upon our bowed heads with an overpowering force, striving against the resistance which it met, as if it would bear us down to the bottom of the lake, and then, repelled by the face of the water, it brushed it into millions of tiny ripples. The temperature fell to 62° Fahr., and with this sudden cold down dropped a severe shower of hailstones of great size, which pelted us with great force, and made our teeth chatter. After this the rain fell in sheets, while the lightning blazed, preceding the most dreadful thunder-claps I remember to have ever heard.