Moreover He Suggested That As They Would Be Compelled To Stay One Day More At The Camp, I Might Push On To Kingaru And Camp There, Until His Arrival.

Acting upon which suggestion I broke camp and started for Kingaru, distant five miles.

On this march the land was more broken, and the caravan first encountered jungle, which gave considerable trouble to our cart. Pisolitic limestone cropped out in boulders and sheets, and we began to imagine ourselves approaching healthy highlands, and as if to give confirmation to the thought, to the north and north-west loomed the purple cones of Udoe, and topmost of all Dilima Peak, about 1,500 feet in height above the sea level. But soon after sinking into a bowl-like valley, green with tall corn, the road slightly deviated from north-west to west, the country still rolling before us in wavy undulations.

In one of the depressions between these lengthy land-swells stood the village of Kingaru, with surroundings significant in their aspect of ague and fever. Perhaps the clouds surcharged with rain, and the overhanging ridges and their dense forests dulled by the gloom, made the place more than usually disagreeable, but my first impressions of the sodden hollow, pent in by those dull woods, with the deep gully close by containing pools of stagnant water, were by no means agreeable.

Before we could arrange our camp and set the tents up, down poured the furious harbinger of the Masika season in torrents sufficient to damp the ardor and newborn love for East Africa I had lately manifested.

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