The land party then returned with Frank to remove the goods to our new camp, and by night my tent was pitched within a hundred yards of the cataract mouth of the Nkenké. We had four cataracts in view of us: the great river which emptied itself into the bay-like expanse from the last line of the Lady Alice Rapids; two miles below, the river fell again, in a foamy line of waves; from the tall cliffs south of us tumbled a river 400 feet into the great river; and on our right, 100 yards off, the Nkenké rushed down steeply like an enormous cascade from the height of 1000 feet. The noise of the Nkenké torrent resembled the roar of an express train over an iron bridge; that of Cataract River, taking its 400-feet leap from the cliffs, was like the rumble of distant thunder; the “Lady Alice’s” last line of breakers, and its fuming and fretting flanks, was heard only as the swash of waves against a ship’s prow when driven by a spanking breeze against a cross sea; while the cataract below lent its dull boom to swell the chorus of angry and falling rivers, which filled our ears with their terrific uproar. Very different was this scene of towering cliffs and lofty mountain walls, which daily discharged the falling streams from the vast uplands above and buried us within the deafening chasm, to that glassy flow of the Livingstone by the black eerie forests of Usongora Meno and Kasera, and through the upper lands of the cannibal Wenya, where a single tremulous wave was a rarity. We now, surrounded by the daily terrors and hope-killing shocks of these apparently endless cataracts, and the loud boom of their baleful fury, remembered, with regretful hearts, the Sabbath stillness and dreamy serenity of those days. Beautiful was it then to glide among the lazy creeks of the spicy and palm-growing isles, where the broad-leafed Amomum vied in greenness with the drooping fronds of the Phrynium, where the myrrh and bdellium shrubs exhaled their fragrance side by side with the wild cassia, where the capsicum with its red-hot berries rose in embowering masses, and the Ipomœa’s purple buds gemmed with colour the tall stem of some sturdy tree. Environed by most dismal prospects, for ever dinned by terrific sound, at all points confronted by the most hopeless outlook, we think that an Eden which we have left behind, and this a watery hell wherein we now are. [Illustration: THE NKENKÉ RIVER ENTERING THE LIVINGSTONE BELOW THE LADY ALICE RAPIDS.]