TAITA TO KILIMA-NJAEO. 
71 
beasts, we stopped to rest till dawn. With the falling 
temperature of the small hours, a brisk wind arose 
from the heated plain and swept the clouds from, off 
the sky, all except the mass that obstinately clung to 
Kilima-njaro. Feverish and over-tired, I could not 
sleep, and sat and watched the heavens, waiting for 
the dawn. A hundred men were snoring around me, 
and the night was anything but silent, for the hyenas 
were laughing hideously in the gloom outside our 
circle of expiring embers. At five o’clock I woke my 
servant Virapan, and whilst he was making my morn¬ 
ing coffee I dropped into a doze, from which, at 
dawn, he roused me, and pointed to the horizon, 
where, in the north-west, a strange sight was to be 
seen. ££ Laputa! ” I exclaimed; and as Virapan, 
though he had read C£ Robinson Crusoe ” and the 
££ Arabian Nights ” in his native tongue, had never 
heard of ££ Gullivers Travels,” I proceeded to enlighten 
him as to the famous suspended island of Swift’s 
imagining, and explained my exclamation by pointing 
to the now visible Kilima-njaro, which, with its two 
peaks of Kibd and Kimawenzi and the parent mass of 
mountain, rose high above a level line of cloud, and 
thus, completely severed in appearance from the earth 
beneath, resembled so strangely the magnetic island 
of Laputa. 
Kilima-njaro was weird in the early flush of dawn, 
with its snowy crater faintly pink against a sky of 
deep blue-grey, wherein the pale and faded moon was 
sinking, and the stars were just discernible; but as 
the stronger light of perfect day prevailed, and the 
clouds which concealed the base of the mountain dis¬ 
appeared, its appearance was disappointing. Owing 
to an atmospheric illusion Kilima-njaro, which was in 
