crops wave again round
villages. Maize fields in a valley are agitated like the swell of the
sea, and gentle breezes rustle through rain-bedewed sugar-cane. Bananas
hang down like golden cucumbers, and in barren places tamarisks and
mimosas perfume the air. Sometimes a halt is made in villages of
well-built grass huts.

Over swampy grasslands soaked by the continuous rains Stanley led his
troop deeper and deeper into Africa. After having lasted forty days, the
rainy season came to an end on the last day of April. The men marched
through a forest of fine Palmyra palms, a tree which grows over almost
all tropical Africa, in India, and on the Sunda Islands, and which is
extolled in an old Indian poem because its fruits, leaves, and wood can
be applied to eight hundred and one various uses. Afterwards the country
became more hilly, and to the west one ridge and crest rose behind
another. The porters and soldiers were glad to leave the damp coast-land
behind and get into drier country, but the ridges made travelling
harder. They encamped in villages of beehive-shaped huts covered with
bamboos and bast, and surrounded by mud walls. Some tracts were so
barren that only cactus, thistles, and thorny bushes could find support
in the dry soil, and near a small lake were seen the tracks of wild
animals, buffaloes, zebras, giraffes, wild boars, and antelopes, which
came there to drink.

Then the route ran through thickets of tamarisk, and under a canopy of
monkey bread-fruit trees, till eventually at a village Stanley fell in
with a large Arab caravan, with which he travelled through the dreaded
warlike land of Ugogo. When they set out together the whole party
numbered 400 men, who marched in Indian file along the narrow paths.

"How are you, White Man?" called out a man at Ugogo in a thundering
voice when Stanley arrived, and when he had set up his quarters in the
chief's village the natives flocked around to gaze at the first white
man they had ever seen. They were friendly and offered milk, honey,
beans, maize, nuts, and water-melons in exchange for cloth and glass
beads, but also demanded a heavy toll from the caravan for the privilege
of passing through their country.

The caravan proceeded through the avenues of the jungle, from time
immemorial frequented by elephants and rhinoceroses. In one district the
huts were of the same form as Kirghiz tents, and in another rocks rose
up in the forest like ruins of a fairy palace.