It was very warm there, as warm as in a hot bath in Finland.
Costly spices grew on the shores: the pepper plant, the cinnamon
tree, ginger, saffron; the coffee plant and the tea plant. Brown
people with long ears and thick lips, and hideously painted
faces, hunted a yellow-spotted tiger among the high bamboos on
the shore, and the tiger turned on them and stuck its claws into
one of the brown men. Then all the others took to flight.

'Shall we land here?' asked the dream-boy.

'No,' said Little Lasse. 'Don't you see the tiger away there by
the pepper plant? Let us travel to another part of the world.'

'We can do so,' said the dream-boy with the blue eyes. 'We are
not far from Africa'--and as he said that they were there.

They anchored at the mouth of a great river where the shores were
as green as the greenest velvet. A little distance from the river
an immense desert stretched away. The air was yellow; the sun
shone so hot, so hot as if it would burn the earth to ashes, and
the people were as black as the blackest jet. They rode across
the desert on tall camels; the lions roared with thirst, and the
great crocodiles with their grey lizard heads and sharp white
teeth gaped up out of the river.

'Shall we land here?' asked the dream-boy.

'No,' said Little Lasse. 'The sun would burn us, and the lions
and the crocodiles would eat us up. Let us travel to another part