On The 12th The Caravan Reached Mussoudi, On The Ungerengeri River. Happily For Our Patient Donkeys This March Was Free From All The Annoying Troubles Of The Jungle.

Happily for ourselves also, for we had no more the care of the packs and the anxiety about arriving at camp before night.

The packs once put firmly on the backs of our good donkeys, they marched into camp - the road being excellent - without a single displacement or cause for one impatient word, soon after leaving Kisemo. A beautiful prospect, glorious in its wild nature, fragrant with its numerous flowers and variety of sweetly-smelling shrubs, among which I recognised the wild sage, the indigo plant, &c., terminated only at the foot of Kira Peak and sister cones, which mark the boundaries between Udoe and Ukami, yet distant twenty miles. Those distant mountains formed a not unfit background to this magnificent picture of open plain, forest patches, and sloping lawns - there was enough of picturesqueness and sublimity in the blue mountains to render it one complete whole. Suppose a Byron saw some of these scenes, he would be inclined to poetize in this manner:

Morn dawns, and with it stern Udoe's hills, Dark Urrugum's rocks, and Kira's peak, Robed half in mist, bedewed with various rills, Arrayed in many a dun and purple streak.

When drawing near the valley of Ungerengeri, granite knobs and protuberances of dazzling quartz showed their heads above the reddish soil. Descending the ridge where these rocks were prominent, we found ourselves in the sable loam deposit of the Ungerengeri, and in the midst of teeming fields of sugar-cane and matama, Indian corn, muhogo, and gardens of curry, egg, and cucumber plants.

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