of "arimos," or outside farms, where villages, villas, and
plantations, threaded by hot and sandy lanes with hedges of green
euphorbia, showed the former prosperity of the country. Beyond it
the land forms, as in Yoruba, lines of crescents bulging west or
seaward, quartz and pebbles showing here and there an old true
coast.

After a five hours' ride we reached Cavua, the half-way house,
where breakfast had been sent on; the habitations are wretched
thatches, crowded with pigs and mosquitoes. Clearings had all
ended, and the red land formed broken waves of poor soil, almost
nude of vegetation at this mid-winter of the tropics, except
thickets of "milk plant" and forests of quadrangular cactus; the
latter are quaint as the dragon-tree, some twenty feet tall and
mostly sun-scorched to touchwood. The baobab (adansonia) is
apparently of two kinds, the "Imbundeiro," hung with long-
stringed calabashes, which forms swarming-places for bees; and
the "Aliconda" (Nkondo), whose gourd is almost sessile, and whose
bark supplies fibre for cloth and ropes. The haskul or big-aloe
of Somali-land was not absent, and, amongst other wild fruits, I
saw scattered over the ground the husks of a strychnine, like the
east African species. Deer, hares, and partridges are spoken of
in these solitudes, but they must be uncommonly hard to find at
such a season.

About three hours after leaving Cavua were spent upon this high,
dry, and healthy desert, when suddenly we sighted the long
reaches of the Cuanza River, sharply contrasting, like the Nile,
with the tawny yellow grounds about its valley. A steep descent
over water-rolled pebbles showed the old bank; the other side,