were nothing
compared with those that now environed them, and in addition to bodily
perils, they must face the daily and terrible fatigue of long marches
through an unknown country, cumbered as they were with arms and other
absolutely necessary baggage. The country through which they were now
passing was named Marengi, a land uninhabited by man, the home of herds
of countless game.

On they went northward and upward through a measureless waste; plain
succeeded plain in endless monotony, distance gave place to distance,
and ever there were more beyond.

Gradually the climate grew colder: they were traversing a portion of
the unexplored plateau that separates southern from central Africa. Its
loneliness was awful, and the bearers began to murmur, saying that they
had reached the end of the world, and were walking over its edge. Indeed
they had only two comforts in this part of their undertaking; the land
lay so high that none of them were stricken by fever, and they could
not well miss the road, which, if Soa was to be believed, ran along the
banks of the river that had its source in the territories of the People
of the Mist.

The adventures that befell them were endless, but it is not proposed to
describe them in detail. Once they starved for three days, being unable
to find game. On another occasion they fell in with a tribe of bushmen
who harassed them with poisoned arrows, killing two of their best
men, and were only prevented from annihilating them through the terror
inspired by their firearms, which they took for magical instruments.

Escaping from the bushmen, they entered a forest country which teemed
with antelope and also with lions, that night by night they must keep
at bay as best they could. Then came several days' march through a plain
strewn with sharp stones which lamed most of the party; and after this
eighty or a hundred miles of dreary rolling veldt, clothed with rank
grass just now brown with the winter frosts, that caught their feet at
every step.

Now at length they halted on the boundary of the land of the People of
the Mist. There before them, not more than a mile away, towered a huge
cliff or wall of rock, stretching across the plain like a giant step,
far as the eye could reach, and varying from seven hundred to a thousand
feet in height. Down the surface of this cliff the river flowed in a
series of beautiful cascades.

Before they had finished their evening meal of buck's flesh the moon