GEOGRAPHY OF USAGARA. 



233 



The people of Usagara suffer in the lower regions from 

 severe ulcerations, from cutaneous disorders, and from 

 other ailments of the plain. Higher up they are healthier, 

 though by no means free from pleurisy, pneumonia, and 

 dysentery. Fever is common ; it is more acute in the 

 range of swamps and decomposed herbage, and is milder 

 in the well-ventilated cols and on the hill-sides. The type 

 is rather a violent bilious attack, accompanied by remit- 

 tent febrile symptoms, than a regular fever. It begins 

 with cold and hot fits, followed by a copious perspira- 

 tion, and sometimes inducing delirium ; it lasts as a 

 quotidian or a tertian from four to seven days ; and 

 though the attacks are slight, they are followed by great 

 debility, want of appetite, of sleep, and of energy. This 

 fever is greatly exacerbated by exposure and fatigue, 

 and it seldom fails to leave behind it a legacy of cerebral 

 or visceral disease. 



The mountains of Usagara are traversed from east to 

 west by two main lines ; the Mukondokwa on the north- 

 ern and the Kiringawana on the southern line. The 

 former was closed until 1856 by a chronic famine, the 

 result of such a neighbourhood as the Wazegura and the 

 people of Whinde on the east, the Wahumba and the 

 Wamasai northwards, and the Warori on the south-west. 

 In 1858 the mountaineers, after murdering by the vilest 

 treachery a young Arab trader, Salim bin Nasir, of the 

 Bu Saidi, or the royal family of Zanzibar, attempted to 

 plunder a large mixed caravan of Wanyamwezi and 

 Wasawahili, numbering 700 or 800 guns, commanded 

 by a stout fellow, Abdullah bin Nasib, called by the 

 Africans "Kisesa," who carried off the cattle, burned the 

 villages, and laid waste the whole of the Eubeho or 

 western chain. 



The clans now tenanting these East African ghauts are 



