14 DUFILE TO MRULI.

scattered huts and villages peeping out of euphorbias and acacias, and here and there an ant-hill, on the summit of which stood out the sharp outline of an antelope; tall Doleb palms too were visible, many with red, purse-shaped nests, like large fruits, constructed by the weaver birds; and in the distance before us rose the lofty summits that skirt the western coast of the Albert Lake. In all parts of the river were baskets and weirs, often of great size, indicating an abundance of fish. Large and small fishing-boats, made out of hollowed trunks, crossed the stream in every direction. Their inmates, generally one, but sometimes two and three persons, were very black in colour, and handled their single paddle with great dexterity.

The euphorbias were very striking in the woods along the bank, not the beautiful column-like euphorbia of which we find isolated specimens in the south, at the foot of, and often upon, the rocks—that only seems to grow on elevated points of land—but the variety which from its entanglement of leafless branches (Salva venia) looks like a broom turned upside down.

Whilst on the western bank the high mountain chain trends away, the eastern bank had gradually sunk, and formed a stretch of low land, rising towards the east, covered by dried-up yellow orass and many bushes. Numerous large herds of antelopes, their red-brown skin blazing in the sunlight, grazed near the river; a troop of about thirty elephants moved slowly along the bank, and snarling, frightened monkeys took to flight as the steamer approached the bank. At last the eastern bank ran into a bare, broad spit of land; the hills on the west bank retreated still farther towards the south-west; the already broad stream became broader; the spit of land was past; we were in the lake !

Rolling mist, through which only the mountain-tops rose into view, shut in the horizon from all sides, thus leaving the imagination free play. Across the beautiful free expanse of water the steamer turned toward the east, so as to reach the mouth of the Somerset Nile; and the nearer we got to the land, the thicker became the floating vegetation, as also the ¢aw/s and banks of mud, overgrown by large-leaved water-lilies, and forming the haunt of hundreds of aquatic birds. Plotus melanogaster is