216 APPENDIX. 
with the remains of the labours of a superior race of natives, 
who had been accustomed to fortify the approaches to their 
town, by closing up the gorges of their ravines by ramparts 
constructed of stone. 
Beyond the line just alluded to as marking the limits of 
penetration into the interior, from the Colony of the Cape of 
Good Hope to the boundaries of Portuguese discovery, a 
huge blank stretches itself quite across the continent, 
utterly unknown to commerce, to science, to philanthropy, 
and to religion. Native testimony has peopled these 
regions with monsters, and with men worse than monsters, 
for it appears to be the object of all savage commu- 
nities to vilify their neighbours; it represents it as thickly 
populated, containing numerous. large towns, extensive 
collections of inland waters, either mediterranean seas 
or great lakes, and considerable forests. It is to this 
part of the continent that the expedition about to leave the 
Colony is to direct its researches, and a more interesting 
field of inquiry can hardly be imagined, or elsewhere exist 
in this globe of ours, which is so rapidly yielding up its 
last store of hidden treasures to the curiosity of man. 
The Genius of Geography, like the Macedonian Hero 
surveying his noble acquirements, will soon have to weep 
over them, regretting that she, too, has no other worlds to 
conquer. ! 
This enormous terra incognita, this sequestered range, 
this unenlightened spot is, after all, an insulated division of 
the continent. It has its defined boundary, and there is 
every reason to believe, from the Portuguese archives, pub- 
lished by the late lamented Mr. Bowdich, a nearly continuous 
one from the eastern to the western oceans. The limits 
enclosing it on the south, that is separating it from the 
countries now traversed by the traders from the Cape of 
Good Hope, have been already traced. 
