d the next day the Beloochs brought him in, looking exactly like a
naughty dog going to be punished.

The sultans, however, of the different villages were generally friendly.

When a desert tract had to be passed, the men went on well enough,
hoping to obtain food at the next cultivated district.

On the 30th of July Speke discerned, four miles off, a sheet of water
which proved to be a creek at the most southern portion of the Nyanza,
called by the Arabs the Ukerewe Sea.

Passing amidst villages and cultivated grounds, they descended to a
watercourse which he called the Jordan. It is frequented by
hippopotami, and rhinoceros pay frequent visits to the fields.

Iron is found in abundance in this district, and nearly all the iron
tools and cutlery used in this part of Eastern Africa is manufactured
here: it is, in truth, the Birmingham of the land. The porters
therefore wished to remain to make purchases of hoes.

A rich country was passed through, and on the 4th of August the caravan,
after leaving the village of Isamiro, ascended a hill, when the vast
expanse of the pale blue waters of the Nyanza burst suddenly on the
travellers' gaze. It was early morning. The distant sea-line of the
north horizon was defined in the calm atmosphere between the north and
west points of the compass. An archipelago of islands intercepted the
line of vision to the left. The sheet of water extended far away to the
eastward, forming the south and east angle of the lake, while two large
islands, distant about twenty or thirty miles, formed the visible north
shore of this firth. _Ukerewe_ is the name by which the whole lake is
called by the Arabs. Below, at no great distance, was the debouchure of
the creek along which he had travelled for the last three days.

This scene would anywhere have arrested the traveller by its peaceful
beauty. He writes enthusiastically--

"The islands, each swelling in a gentle slope to a rounded summit
clothed with wood, between the rugged, angular, closely-cropping rocks
of granite, seen mirrored in the calm surface of the lake, on which is
here and there detected the a small black speck--the tiny canoe of some
Muanza fisherman. On the gentle-shelving plain below me blue smoke
curled above the trees, which here and there partially concealed
villages and hamlets, their brown thatched roofs contrasting with the
emerald green of the beautiful milk-bush, the coral bunches of which
clustered in such