I soon satisfied him about the gunpowder, and the next day was appointed for taking the first step in the process, by making some charcoal, for I was led to suppose that the inferiority of the coarse grey-looking sort of native manufacture was owing to the badness of that article. Two of Tinta’s servants were immediately despatched for wood of the “ted” (_Juniperus oxycedrus_) tree, which I had chosen as best calculated for charcoal. The ted tree is a species of pine, and grows in the characteristic form of that tree. The wood smells exactly like cedar, and is extensively used for fuel in the royal residences. It does not grow on the table land, but only in the upper portions of the valleys of Efat and corresponding situations, at an elevation of between six and eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. A large euphorbia called kol-qual, sometimes thirty feet high, with strong spreading arms, bearing at their extremities a little red fig-like fruit, was pointed out to me by the Shoans as the tree supposed to produce the best charcoal. This cannot be the tree that Bruce asserts yielded so much milk-like juice upon striking it with his scimitar, although I have heard it asserted that it is. On making the experiment myself on several of different ages, I never could produce more than a mere exudation of a white fluid, which collected in drops, and which I found upon inspissation turned black, and formed a substance not unlike Indian rubber. The most singular circumstance respecting this tree is the four-sided character of its branches, being as angular as if put together by a carpenter. On examining the interior of a decayed portion, I found a shell of hard wood not more than three-fourths of an inch in thickness; and the interior sometimes, from side to side, several inches wide, hollow, but divided into chambers by partitions, consisting of a substance like the paper formed by wasps in constructing their tree-suspended nests.