258 



Selections. 



[NO. 6, NEW SERIES, 



The Missionaries and all acquainted with the country have 

 wondered at our using instruments at Usambara : — the dazzle of 

 a sextant makes every man thirst for your blood. The climate 

 also is hostile to the traveller in more ways than one. Captain 

 Spike, my well tried and energetic companion, has twice suffered 

 severely from sickness, jungle fever and catarrh, — in consequence 

 of exposure to disc whilst taking observations. The simplest geo- 

 graphical operations become at times impossible. During our two 

 days and two nights at Fuja, a dense poll of clouds overhung the 

 sky, the rains had set in, though the half of February had not till 

 elapsed ; we never saw the sun, and we could not find even a star 

 we had descended the hills. In these regions, the traveller's chief 

 study must be to make things easy, to take all easy, and do only what 

 is easy. I doubt the route crossing any great mountain ridge as you 

 suppose : it leads, say the Arabs, with a steady rise and an occa- 

 sional ascent, between the coast and lake. As regards our alti- 

 tudes on the way, we can boil Thermometers and register the 

 Barometer; — for objects off the line of march we must depend 

 upon compass bearings, a Pedometer horse-line and vertical angles 

 observed with a large or small sextant. I have the honor to for- 

 ward a few specimens of the coast formation : but for the sickness 

 which cut short our journey, our collection would have been less 

 meagre. The mountain zone, like Zanzibar and its adjacent Is- 

 lands, is a mass of corallines, often shelly and coated with red, 

 yellow and black argillaceous soils, rendered fertile by decayed 

 animal and vegetable matter. In some places there are distinct 

 sea-beaches rising 100 to 150 feet above the alluvial plain. In 

 others I could find none. 



From Mombas to the Panjany river (the tract called in Sawahil 

 " Mrima" or the Mountain Region) stretches a broken line of 

 sandstone at some distance from the coast, and varying from 700 

 to 1,200 feet above the sea level. The interior is gneiss, quartz 

 and sandstone, with detached hills of tufas and grey granite : the 

 latter is so micaceous that the Belooch garrison cannot banish 

 their belief that it contains gold. As at Madagascar no limestone 

 appeared, and the result of enquiry is a doubt of its existence. I 



