oon came to the edge of a desert,
and there we halted till the Negroes had filled several calabashes and
gourds full of water, and collected a quantity of boiled corn. As soon
as this was done, we set off again, and entered the desert. We were
astonished and terrified when we looked around us, not a single
vestige of herbage, not a blade of grass was to be seen--all was one
wide waste of barren sand, so light as to rise in clouds at the least
wind, and we sank so deep in walking through it that at last we could
hardly drag one foot after the other. But we were repaid for our
fatigue, for when we halted at night, no fires were lighted, and to
our great delight we found that there were no musquitoes to annoy us.
We fell into a sound sleep, which lasted till morning, and were much
refreshed; indeed, so much so as to enable us to pursue our journey
with alacrity.

In our passage over the desert we saw numbers of elephants' teeth, but
no animals. How the teeth came there, unless it were that the
elephants were lost in attempting to cross the desert, I cannot
pretend to say. Before we had crossed the desert, our water was
expended, and we suffered dreadfully from thirst, walking as we did
during the whole day under a vertical sun. The night was equally
painful, as we were so tortured with the want of water; but on the
following day, when our strength was nearly exhausted, and we were
debating whether we should not lie down and allow the spears of our
conductors to put an end to our miseries, we came to the banks of a
river which the Negroes had evidently been anxiously looking for. Here
we drank plentifully, and remained all the day to recruit ourselves,
for the Negroes were almost as exhausted as we were. The next morning
we crossed the river, and plunged into a deep wood: the ground being
high, the musquitoes did not annoy us so much as they did down on the
low marshy land near the sea-coast. During our traverse through the
wood, we subsisted solely upon the birds and animals which the Negroes
killed with their bows and arrows.

When we had forced our way through the forest, we found the country,
as before, interspersed with wicker villages or small hamlets at a few
miles' distance from each other. Round each village there were small
patches of Guinea corn, and we frequently came to clusters of huts
which had been deserted. Between the sea-coast and the desert we had
traversed we observed that many of the inhabitants had