The first extends from Kaole, near the mouth
of the river Kingani, to Zungomero, which is at
the head of the great river valley, and forms the
maritime regions. It is a land of luxuriant
vegetation, abundantly watered; the villages,
too, are numerous, but small and thinly
populated. The inhabitants are a fringe of Moslems
along the coast, and inland the Wazaramo and
Wak'hutu tribes. The first of these seem to
form the chief obstacle to trade on the east
coast. They resist the passage of caravans, take
toll from the merchants, both as they enter and
leave the country, and, in fact, absorb all the
profits of the trade. Very often, too, they lie
in wait and discharge poisoned arrows at the
trespassers. Almost the only crime they punish
is Ushawe, or black magic. As on the west
coast, the power of conviction rests wholly with
the " medicine man," and the ordeal prescribed
by him is of such a nature that conviction is sure
to follow, and then the sentence of death is
carried into immediate execution. Among the
Wazaramo the accused are burnt to death, and
every few miles you come upon one or two heaps
of ashes, with calcined and blackened human
bones; sometimes, close to the two large circles,
where the father and mother have been burnt,
a small circle shows that a poor little child has
also shared their fate.

Many of those accused of " black magic"
are sold into slavery, and they are the slaves
most sought after, for they never run away. If
they did they must either starve in the bush or
suffer death at the hands of a hostile tribe. They
dare not return to their own, as they would be
murdered immediately.

There are certain customs which have grown
into laws in Eastern Africa, and which, with
some modifications, are common to all the
tribes of which we shall have to speak. One is
the oath of brotherhood. Members of the same
or of different tribes elect each other as brothers.
They perform a ceremony, during which each
one eats a piece of meat smeared with the other's
blood, or else receives some of his adopted
brother's blood in a leaf, and rubs it into the wound
from which his own blood has been taken. This
is a very strong tie, as they believe that death or
slavery would overtake the man who broke his
brotherhood.

In some parts they believe that a curse
attends any one who appropriates an article
found on the road; and a watch, lost by the
expedition, was picked up by the country people
and returned, very carefully wrapped in grass
and leaves. But this, unfortunately, is only a
local superstition. Many tribes are also alike in
their customs with regard to children. The
child that cuts the two upper incisors before the
lower is either put to death, given away, or sold
to the slave merchant. They believe that it
would bring disease, calamity, and death into the
household. The Arabs of Zanzibar have the
same superstition, but instead of putting the
child to death they read passages from the
Koran, and make it swear, by nodding its head,
not to injure those about it.

The woman who is about to become a mother
retires to the bush for an hour or two, and
returns with a baby in her arms and a bundle of
firewood—which she has taken the opportunity
of collecting—on her back. Twins are either put
to death or exposed in the jungle. If a child
dies young, the mother has to undergo a kind of
penance. She is smeared with fat and flour, sits
on the outside of the village, and the people
come round, hooting and mocking her. In
one respect the inhabitants of the Maritime
Region are more civilised than their neighbours:
they bury their dead stretched out in the dress
worn during life.

Leaving the maritime, we come to the second
or mountain region. It extends from
Zungomero over the mountains of Usagara to
Ugogi, and is traversed by caravans in three or
four weeks.

The mountains of Usagara are supposed to
form part of a chain extending both north and
south. They are the only important elevations
between the coast and the great lake. That part
of the chain crossed by the expedition is divided
into three parallel ridges, with valleys between
each. The greatest height was found to be five
thousand seven hundred feet above the level of
the sea. The climate is cold and damp, but the
upper regions of the hills are salubrious, and
many parts are very fertile.

The nearest approach to civilisation shown
by the inhabitants of this region is that they
feel the want of—— a pocket. In order to
remedy what they consider a natural deficiency,
they pierce the lobe of the ear and distend the
hole by packing into it bits of cane, wood, and
quills, until it is large enough to carry a cane
snuff box, a goat's horn pierced for a fife and
any other small valuable they care to have about
them.

A very desolate region this, for the
traveller. In many parts the natives dig the rats
out of their holes for food. The line of march
is for the most part barren, and small-pox and
starvation dog the caravans. Bleached human
skeletons marked the track. The expedition
followed a caravan which had lost fifty of its
members by small-pox, and the swollen corpses
lay along the road. Under these circumstances
every succeeding party catches the infection,
and Captain Burton records that several of his
porters " lagged behind," and probably threw
themselves into some jungle to die.

The third region is a flat table-land. It
extends from Ugogi at the western base of the
mountains to the eastern district of Unyamwesi.

It is an arid and sterile land, for the
mountains to the east of it have robbed the south-
east trade winds of their vapours. The
traveller sees only a glaring yellow flat, darkened
here and there by the growth of succulent
plants, thorny bush, and stunted trees. Many
parts of the region suffer from perpetual
drought, and water is nowhere either good or
plentiful. The land is therefore not fertile;
cotton and tobacco, which flourish everywhere