testimony. Hideously withered women followed the march of the mission,
carrying curds, and covered over with marsh-flies. Above, vast flights of
locusts, which had stripped the coast, were pouring in towards Abyssinia.
"They quite darkened the air" where the caravan halted; and above them
again were a host of adjutant birds, sometimes bursting down through the
mass, and then stooping to the ground, and stalking along to devour the
killed and wounded. This is the land, too, of the hurricane. Nature is
queen or tyrant here; the thunder tears the sensorium; the lightning burns
out the eyes; the rain is a cataract; the hall is a continued volley of
ice; the clouds stoop to earth, and bury the daylight like a shroud; the
rivers become torrents; the dry plain becomes first a swamp, and then a
sea. Tents and tarpaulins are useless to keep out the deluge from above,
or are beaten down by its weight on the heads of the unfortunates who
trust to them for shelter, until at length the caravan, stripped of all
covering, has no resource but to bide the pelting of the pitiless storm,
and, shivering and shelterless, wait until the hurricane has howled itself
away.

At length they reached the city of Furri, loaded, for the thirty-fifth
time, with the baggage of the British embassy. The caravan, escorted by a
detachment of three hundred matchlock men, with flutes playing, and
muskets echoing, and the heads of the warriors decorated with white plumes,
on the 16th July entered the frontier town of the kingdom of Efat.
Clusters of conical-roofed houses, covering the sides of twin hills, here
presented the first permanent habitations that had greeted the eye since
leaving the sea-coast--rude and ungainly, but right welcome signs of
transition from depopulated waste to the abodes of man. The African seems
a robber by nature, and the sight of the bales and boxes excited the
national propensity in a most violent degree. Even the royal ministers and
courtiers seem to have felt a passion for looking into those prohibited