Saadani with letters of introduction, both from his Highness and Dr. Kirk, to Bwana Heri, the native chief of that place, and whose influence, Dr. Kirk tells me, extends a long way inland. Two European residents of this place accompanied me for the sake of a hunt for a day or two. One of these gentlemen was formerly connected with the Universities' Mission, and is a good speaker of Swahili, and was, therefore, valuable to me as interpreter. I took my Kilangozi (Asmani), cook, and personal attendant (my Zulu); I took, also, my tent and camp outfit complete, and had a trial of East African camp life.

"With a fair wind, it takes a dhouw about five to six hours from here to Saadani; but we were eight hours, having been becalmed about midchannel for nearly three hours. We arrived on Thursday evening, and remained till Monday evening.

"On the Friday morning after our arrival, the approach of an ivory caravan from Unyamwezi was announced, and in the course of an hour or so the drums began to sound, and the caravan came marching into the town. It belonged to a chief of the name of Kitebi, of Ushetu, a district lying to the north or north-west of Unyanyembe. The carriers looked lean and weather-beaten, and glad enough to put down their loads, which were piled up in front of the house which Bwana Heri had kindly placed at our disposal the previous night, while another was being got ready for our further residence. You may be sure the arrival of that caravan was an event of great interest to me, coming as it was from the very route which I proposed to take, and from those very countries which our mission party will, by-and-by, have to traverse. I had scores of questions to ask about the roads, the swamps, the rivers, the forests, the hills, the valleys, the peoples, countries, peace and war, famine and plenty, &c. ; but of course it was Bwana Heri's privilege to do the first pumping, and I must bide my time. In the meantime, we shifted to our new quarters, pitched the tent, and set our establishment a-going. After breakfast, my two companions went out to hunt, and I remained to get what I could out of the new arrivals. I soon began to realize the difficulty often referred to in books of travel in East Africa, viz., that of getting reliable information from such people. They seem quite unable to comprehend why a white man should want to know so much about their countries, or the roads leading to them or from them. It is almost impossible to get them to treat your questions seriously. They seem always to fancy that you want to entrap them in some way or other; and hence, in their answers, their object is not so much to give you real information as to let you see that they are not so easily to be made fools

of. Of course, after a while, they become more acquainted with one, and the intercourse begins to assume a more natural form, and you can place more reliance upon what you hear from them. After spending some time in questioning these Washetu, straining my Swahili vocabulary to its very utmost limit, and, I fear, going altogether beyond the acknowledged lines of grammar, to say nothing of taxing, to a very alarming extent, my interpreter's (native) limited knowledge of English, I did not manage to elicit much information worth recording, except that the people are all at peace along the route, and that there is no particular difficulty in the way of travelling, except the ordinary one of hongo. This is so far encouraging. As to the distance from Saadani to Mpwapwa, well, that was a month. I dare say it would take them, poor wretches, a month to do it; but the time that most agrec about is from fourteen to twenty days, according as you travel, fast or slowly. I have heard of some who have done it in eight days."

INTERVIEW WITH THE CHIEF.

The

"Bwana Heri's reception of me was everything I could desire. night we arrived he was not at home; he had gone to pay a visit to a village called Ndumi, about five miles off. His deputy sent a messenger at once to inform him of our arrival. Late as it was, he came that night, some time after midnight. Next morning he presented me with a goat, and requested that I should let him know anything I wanted; that he would be glad to be at my service all the time I should be at his town. He was very much pleased to hear that I wanted to make his road the white man's road into the interior. He was also pleased to hear about the proposal to introduce waggons, and he offered to send up at once to Useguha to buy oxen for me, as he had nothing but cows and very young oxen. I could not do this, however, for I was not sure about a cart, but promised to send him word from Zanzibar. He himself had been to Usagara, but the nearest road to Mpwapwa passed to the right of Usagara and to the left of the Nguru Mountains, avoiding all the high mountain ranges. He assured me that cattle had been brought repeatedly from Unyamwezi to Saadani, and that there was no such thing as a fly which killed cattle along that route. So far, the course for waggons and oxen seemed clear, and it only remained for me to make the experiment. Bwana Heri promised, quite of his own accord, to escort me in person to the Useguha country, about four days, and to give me men to take me all the way to Mpwapwa."

A HUNTING EXPEDITION.

"As our dhouw had returned to Zanzibar, and there was no prospect of our being able to get away from Saadani till Monday, I determined to join. my two companions on the Saturday for a buffalo hunt. We were promised a herd at no great distance. We had, however, to walk about five or six miles before we got sight of them, and even then they got sight of us first, and made off at full speed. In the rush after them I got my first baptism, not of fire, but of water, in East Africa. Soon after the chase began, I had to cross a stream, which seemed very insignificant, and which I proposed to clear with a jump. But my gun-carrier thought otherwise, and pulled across it a log of wood that was lying close by. Then, standing in the stream, which I then found was about four feet deep, I stepped on to the wood, using the man's shoulder as a rail; then, from the wood, I was stepping on to terra firma, as I thought, and as the man thought too, but, lo! it was long grass, which let me down to my hips in the stream. The man, in his scramble to save me, trod on my leg, and sent me deeper still. I got out as quickly as I could, but not before I had taken in a considerable quantity of water, which very materially cooled my ardour in the chase. Suffice it to say, that all the buffaloes got was a bit of a fright by Mr. Morton firing a couple of balls after them in disgust, with but little chance of their being hurt. Considerably disgusted with our morning's work, we returned to Saadana, where we arrived at one o'clock, after a walk of fifteen miles, having to wade through a number of lagoons, six or eight inches deep of mud and water. This took us seven hours, and all this before breakfast—almost a severe enough ordeal to be called a 'baptism of fire.' I am not likely to be tempted so far after buffaloes again, unless I am very hard pressed for breakfast.

"Saadani is by no means a healthy place, especially at this season. Some parts of the town are, if anything, below the sea-level, and there are lagoons all round, which were then fast drying up, producing an abundant supply of miasma."

VISIT TO NDUMI.

"We did not much relish the idea of being compelled to lie still there the whole of Sunday, so I proposed we should go up to Ndumi on Sunday morning early, spend the day there, and come down in the evening. On Saturday afternoon we mentioned our proposal to Bwana Heri. He approved of it, and offered to supply us with donkeys. After a while, finding that he and his people were richer in that most valuable quadruped than he had known, he proposed to accompany us himself. All this was

very gratifying. Sunday morning came, and we all set off pretty early, and got to Ndumi in an hour and a half, from which I judge that it is distant from Saadani about five miles.

"NDUMI is quite a prominent object on that part of the coast line, and to me an object of peculiar interest as being the first halting place of all caravans from Saadani to the interior. It is situated on the summit of a knoll which stands out quite boldly even amidst the many elevations all round. The village itself is comparatively small, but just about big enough to cover the apex of the knoll. It is the private property of Bwana Heri— his farm or shamba, and the population consists of converts to the Mahommedan faith from different interior tribes. He gives them protection, and they give him their service, in the cultivation of his fields, &c. What renders Ndumi so very prominent is a noble Baobab tree which crowns the knoll. All the way from Saadani to the foot of Ndumi there is a gradual ascent. There is a good deal of forest and jungle, among which I recognized several old acquaintances, prominent amongst which was the celebrated Wait-a-bit thorn of the Cape Colony, and of the interior of course.

"With regard to the practicability of a waggon road from Saadani to Ndumi, during the dry season, I see no difficulty about it. There are just two narrow strips of jungle through which one would have to cut. Beyond that there is nothing more than a branch or bush here and there which would be any hindrance to a waggon. Both Bwana Heri and Asmani assure me that the bush and forest are pretty much what I saw them, all the way to Mpwapwa. It would be quite impracticable, however, to work with waggons on the coast line until the dry season has fairly set in, which is about the beginning of July; that is to say, the country is then generally hard and dry. Even where there is no standing water the ground gets so thoroughly saturated that a loaded waggon would inevitably sink, and hopelessly stick. Even when I passed from Saadani to Ndumi (May 14th), there was scarcely any water that could not easily be avoided, but the ground was still saturated: Still had it continued dry from that time to this, the ground would by this time be hard enough for anything. The rains are, however, this year unusually heavy and prolonged. rains have fallen since my return, both here and at Saadani.

THE SAADANI AND BAGAMOYO ROUTES COMPARED.

Very heavy

"Ndumi stands due west from Saadani, and forms part of a very elevated belt of country, which looks in the distance (for it is often seen from here on a clear day) like a range of hills. This belt stretches south-west and north-east as far as the eye can see. To the north-east, the range gradually

approaches to the sea, and somewhere north of the Pangani, I should think about opposite the island of Pemba, it juts into the sea altogether-whilst in the other direction it recedes farther and farther from the coast line, following I think the direction of the Wami, in fact, forming one side of the Wami Valley. This would probably be the range of which I spoke in a former letter as having been seen by Mr. Oates from the Wami, and represented as two days distant. The route from Ndumi to Mpwapwa, lies right across the belt. Hence one advantage of the Saadani over the Bagamoyo route is that in the former you begin to rise almost at once, but in the latter you have to traverse for many days a low-lying, swampy and malarious country, and then you get rising before you, abruptly and to a great height, the Usagara hills.

"By the way we found that Bwana Heri must have sent up word on Saturday to give his people notice of our intended visit, for on our arrival at Ndumi, there was a great breakfast provided for us, and all ready to be served. The spread consisted of no less than a dozen different dishes, of several of which I partook and enjoyed. But this was not enough: Bwana Heri must needs present me with a sheep. It being Sunday, and as we did not need food, I asked him to have it sent to Saadani for slaughter next day. On Monday morning our dhouw returned from Zanzibar, but the Captain reported that he could not leave till nearly midnight on account of wind and tide.

NATIVE FESTIVITIES.

"In the afternoon of Monday, when all our traps were packed ready for taking on board before dark, as we hoped, I heard the beating of drums at Bwana Heri's place. By and by my friend came over and informed Mr. Morton that, as Bwana Mkubwa (the big master) was a big man, he had been getting up a dance for his entertainment, and in honour of his visit, and that he had come himself to ask Bwana Mkubwa to come and see it. I could not decline such an honour, and accordingly we all three accompanied Bwana Heri to his khotla. There we found three enormous drums hard at work. These were made out of the trunks of huge trees hollowed out. There was also a huge horn six feet six inches high, a Swahili clarionet, and a gong. There were also present one dozen of the belles of Saadani, attired specially for the occasion, in their most gaudy prints and costly ornaments— nose, ear, neck, arms and legs. I admired least of all the taste of those who had the nose-rings with pellets attached. But perhaps it was my own want of taste. The female beauty of Saadani was represented by that select dozen, there being no more females present. Man-kind, however, was