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We should be looking like ghosts ourselves, and despair
would be seizing on our hearts. We should be in continual
squabbles with our guides and porters, and completely
exposed to their unbridled brutality. During the daytime,
a damp, penetrating, unendurable humidity! At
night, a cold frequently intolerable, and the stings of a
kind of fly whose bite pierces the thickest cloth, and drives
the victim crazy! All this, too, without saying any thing
about wild beasts and ferocious native tribes!"
"I move that we don't try it!" said Joe, in his droll way.
"I exaggerate nothing," continued Ferguson, "for,
upon reading the narratives of such travellers as have had
the hardihood to venture into these regions, your eyes
would fill with tears."
About eleven o'clock they were passing over the basin
of Imenge, and the tribes scattered over the adjacent hills
were impotently menacing the Victoria with their weapons.
Finally, she sped along as far as the last undulations
of the country which precede Rubeho. These form the
last and loftiest chain of the mountains of Usagara.
The aeronauts took careful and complete note of the
orographic conformation of the country. The three ramifications
mentioned, of which the Duthumi forms the first
link, are separated by immense longitudinal plains. These
elevated summits consist of rounded cones, between which
the soil is bestrewn with erratic blocks of stone and gravelly
bowlders. The most abrupt declivity of these mountains
confronts the Zanzibar coast, but the western slopes
are merely inclined planes. The depressions in the soil
are covered with a black, rich loam, on which there is a
vigorous vegetation. Various water-courses filter through,
toward the east, and work their way onward to flow into
the Kingani, in the midst of gigantic clumps of sycamore,
tamarind, calabash, and palmyra trees.
"Attention!" said Dr. Ferguson. "We are approaching Rubeho, the
name of which signifies, in the language of the country, the
'Passage of the Winds,' and we would do well to double its jagged
pinnacles at a certain height. If my chart be exact, we are going
to ascend to an elevation of five thousand feet."
"Shall we often have occasion to reach those far upper
belts of the atmosphere?"
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