y in Central Africa.

Among the gentlemen who had visited the station was Mr Oswell, in the
East India Company's service. He deserves to take rank as an African
traveller. Hearing that Dr Livingstone purposed crossing the Kalahara
Desert in search of the great Lake Ngami, long known to exist, he came
from India on purpose to join him, accompanied by Mr Murray,
volunteering to pay the entire expenses of the guides.

The Kalahara, though called a desert from being composed of soft sand
and being destitute of water, supports prodigious herds of antelopes,
while numbers of elephants, rhinoceros, lions, hyenas, and other animals
roam over it. They find support from the astonishing quantity of grass
which grows in the region, as also from a species of water-melon, and
from several tuberous roots, the most curious of which is the
_leroshua_, as large as the head of a young child, and filled with a
fluid like that of a turnip. Another, the _mokuri_, an herbaceous
creeper, the tubers of which, as large as a man's head, it deposits in a
circle of a yard or more horizontally from the stem. On the
water-melons especially, the elephants and other wild animals revel
luxuriously.

Such was the desert Dr Livingstone and his party proposed to cross when
they set out with their wagon on the 1st of June, 1849, from Kolobeng.
Instead, however, of taking a direct course across it, they determined
to take a more circuitous route, which, though longer, they hoped would
prove safer.

Continuing on, they traversed three hundred miles of desert, when, at
the end of a month, they reached the banks of the Zouga, a large river,
richly fringed with fruit-bearing and other trees, many of them of
gigantic growth, running north-east towards Lake Ngami. They received a
cordial welcome from the peace-loving inhabitants of its banks, the
Bayeiye.

Leaving the wagons in charge of the natives, with the exception of a
small one which proceeded along the bank, Dr Livingstone embarked in
one of their canoes. Frail as are the canoes of the natives, they make
long trips in them, and manage them with great skill, often standing up
and paddling with long light poles. They thus daringly attack the
hippopotami in their haunts, or pursue the swift antelope which ventures
to swim across the river. After voyaging on the stream for twelve days,
they reached the broad expanse of Lake Ngami. Though wide, it is
excessively shallow, and brackish during the r