We landed on the morning of Jan. 27, and were received with peculiar cordiality. In the absence of the Arab Governor, Mohammed bin Ali, we were met upon the seashore by Khalfan bin Abdillah, Hammed bin Abdillah, and the headman Kibaya Mchanga, with sundry Diwans and Wasawihili notables; by the Jemadar, with his Baloch, and by Miyan Sahib, a daft old Hindu, who here collects the customs. They conducted us up the bank to the hut formerly tenanted by M. Erhardt, seated us on chairs facing couches; brought coffee, fruit, and milk, with a goat, by way of welcome, and succeeded in winning our hearts. That day was spent in inquiries about the commerce and geography of the interior, and in listening to wild tales concerning the Æthiopic Olympus, the Sierra Nevada of Eastern Africa, which Jupiter Cooley decreed to be eternally snowless. Most of the people here pronounced the word Kilima-ngao ‘Mont bouclier,’ Ngáo being the umbo or shield-boss: from others I heard Kilima-njaro, which in Kikwafi, according to the missionaries, means ‘Mountain of Greatness.’[26] Here Sheddad bin ’Ad built the City of Brass, and encrusted the hill-top with a silver dome, that shines with various and surprising colours. Here the Jánn, beings made of fire, as humans are of earth and mermen of water, hold their court, and baffle the attempts of man’s adventurous feet. The mountain recedes as the traveller advances, and the higher he ascends the loftier rises the summit. At last blood bursts from the nostrils, the fingers bend backwards (with cramp?), and the hardiest is fain to stop. Amongst this Herodotian tissue of fact and fable[27] ran one golden thread of truth,—all testified to the intense cold. Westward of the great mountain are placed in the ‘Mombas Mission Map’ the Wabilikimo (Wambelikimo), ‘literally the two measuring, i. e. twice the measure from the middle fingertip to the elbow. This is of course an exaggeration, but they are no doubt a diminutive race of men. They come to Jagga to trade, where they are called Wakoningo.’ The name, however, ‘Kimo,’ or Vazimba, the first occupants of Ankova (Madagascar), is mentioned even by Rochon: he makes them a people of pigmies, in stature averaging three feet six inches, of a lighter colour than the negro, long-armed, and with short woolly hair. South of Kafa, again, the Doko[28] race is said to be only four feet in stature. Formerly we explained these traditional Blemmyes, or pigmies, by supposing them to be apes that have been submitted to savage exaggeration. But the state of the question has been completely changed since the Second Expedition of my friend Paul du Chaillu, who, despite the late Mr John Craufurd, discovered, the ‘Obongo,’ a race not only dwarfish, but living close to a tribe of unusually tall and powerful negroes: curious to say, they occupy about the same parallel of latitude as do the traditional Wabilikimo.