As We Ascended A Wave Of Reddish Earth Covered With Tall Weeds And Cane, But A Few Feet From Us, And Directly Across Our Path, Were The Fields Of Matama And Grain We Had Been Looking For, And Ugogo Had Been Entered An Hour Before.

The view was not such as I expected.

I had imagined a plateau several hundred feet higher than Marenga Mkali, and an expansive view which should reveal Ugogo and its characteristics at once. But instead, while travelling from the tall weeds which covered the clearing which had preceded the cultivated parts, we had entered into the depths of the taller matama stalks, and, excepting some distant hills near Mvumi, where the Great Sultan lived - the first of the tribe to whom we should pay tribute - the view was extremely limited.

However, in the neighbourhood of the first village a glimpse at some of the peculiar features of Ugogo was obtained, and there was a vast plain - now flat, now heaving upwards, here level as a table, there tilted up into rugged knolls bristling with scores of rough boulders of immense size, which lay piled one above another as if the children of a Titanic race had been playing at house-building. Indeed, these piles of rounded, angular, and riven rock formed miniature hills of themselves; and appeared as if each body had been ejected upwards by some violent agency beneath. There was one of these in particular, near Mvumi, which was so large, and being slightly obscured from view by the outspreading branches of a gigantic baobab, bore such a strong resemblance to a square tower of massive dimensions, that for a long time I cherished the idea that I had discovered something most interesting which had strangely escaped the notice of my predecessors in East Africa.

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