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THE LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. 



water lies deep below the surface, the hills and hill- plains 

 are clothed with a thin shrubbery of mimosas and other 

 thorny gums. Throughout Eastern Africa these forests 

 are the only spots in which travelling is enjoyable : great 

 indeed is their contrast with the normal features — bald 

 glaring fields, fetid bush and grass, and monotonous 

 expanses of dull dead herbage, concealing swamps and 

 water-courses, hedged in by vegetation whose only 

 varieties are green, greener, and greenest. In these fav- 

 oured places the traveller appears surrounded by a thick 

 wood which he never reaches, the trees thinning out as 

 he advances. On clear and sunny days the scenery is 

 strange and imposing. The dark-red earth is pro- 

 longed half-way up the tree-trunks by the ascending 

 and descending galleries of the termite : contrasting 

 with this peculiarly African tint, the foliage, mostly 

 confined to the upper branches, is of a tender and 

 lively green, whose open fret- work admits from above the 

 vivid blue or the golden yellow of an unclouded sky. 

 In the basins where water is nearer the surface, and 

 upon the banks of water-courses and rivulets, the sweet 

 and fertile earth produces a rich vegetation, and a 

 gigantic growth of timber, which distinguishes this 

 region from others further west. Usagara is peculiarly 

 the land of jungle-flowers, and fruits, whose charac- 

 teristic is a pleasant acidity, a provision of nature 

 in climates where antiseptics and correctives to bile 

 are almost necessaries of life. They are abundant, 

 but, being uncultivated, the fleshy parts are unde- 

 veloped. In the plains, the air, heavy with the deli- 

 cious perfume of the jasmine (Jasminum Abyssinicum ?), 

 with the strong odour of a kind of sage (Salvia Afri- 

 cana, or Abyssinicaf), and with the fragrant exhalations 

 of the mimosa-flowers, which hang like golden balls from 



