Aa MRULI TO RUBAGA IN UGANDA.

by a different route. Through grass and reeds the road winds by a hundred curves up the steep mountain of Kyapisi, the pass of which is marked by a single fig-tree visible from a long distance. Unfortunately, gigantic grasses shut out every view. Reaching the top of the pass, a very fruitful land spread itself out before us. Extensive plantations of every kind hemmed in the road. Heavily-laden cornfields awaited the reapers. Before the huts great heaps of green tobacco and yellow maize were drying, but no inhabitant was to be seen. No sound was heard among the silent houses, not even the cackle of a hen. A death-like silence hung over the whole land. Upon the enormous square, outside Muambia’s chief village, Degéa, the grass erew knee-high, and the extensive courtyards and houses were deserted. In the burning midday sun rustled the bare branches of a poisonous euphorbia. Lizards ran quickly over the road. A poison-tree in a devastated land! Jor this was the explanation of the silence. Mtésa’s emissaries had fallen upon this district by night and carried off people and herds, stores, and household goods, to pander to their ruler’s covetousness. Pieces of newly-made mbugu, half-finished and delicately-woven erass mats, still lay before some of the houses; the housewives had been torn away from their work to increase the number of slaves in the king’s household.

We marched on and reached the little district of Nasirie, where human beings again made their appearance, and where all seemed to be indulging in the full enjoyment of their own possessions. Here a clear, flowing stream, journeying from west to east, babbled along in its deep sandy bed, and soon after fol-Jowed one of those deep morasses that exist only in Uganda, and about which H. Linant so bitterly complained. One sinks up to the waist in the black, thick, stinking mud, and although people have tried to erect a kind of bridge in some places with the stems of the abundant date palm, those places are just the most dangerous, because the stems, having no firm foundation, invariably roll away from under the foot when one steps on them. After sundry halts we happily regained dry ground, and marching through clean reed fences we reached the thicklypopulated village Kitakuba, which belongs to my old acquaintance Kyibrango, who unfortunately was absent. .