Though out of Urimi at last, yet Stanley found the natives of Iramba a very little improvement on those of the former district. Mirambo was their terror, and hence they were suspicious of all strangers. Again and again he was mistaken for this terrible chieftain, and narrowly escaped being attacked. In fact, this formidable warrior was fighting at one time within a day's march of him.
Urukuma was the next district he entered after Iramba, and he found it thickly peopled and rich in cattle. It consisted for the most part of rolling plains, with scattered chains of jagged hills. He was on the slope that led to the Nyanza, and the descent was so gradual, that he expected to find the lake, whose exploration he designed to make thorough and complete, comparatively shallow, although it covered a vast area. At last he reached a little village, not a hundred yards from the shore, and encamped. At this point he describes the topography of the new country he had passed over. He says:
"As far as Western Ugogo I may pass over without attempting to describe the country, as readers may obtain a detailed account of it from 'How I Found Livingstone.' Thence north is a new country to all, and a brief description of it may be interesting to students of African geography.
"North of Mizanza a level plain extends as far as the frontier of Urandawi, a distance of thirty-five miles (English). At Mukondoku the altitude, as indicated by two first-rate aneroids, was two thousand, eight hundred feet. At Mtiwi, twenty miles north, the altitude was two thousand eight hundred and twenty-five feet. Diverging west and north-west, we ascend the slope of a lengthy mountain-wall, apparently, but which, upon arriving at the summit, we ascertain to be a wide plateau covered with forests. This plateau has an altitude of three thousand eight hundred feet at its eastern extremity; but, as it extends westward it rises to a height of four thousand five hundred feet. It embraces all Uyanzi, Unyanyembe, Usukuma, Urimi and Iramba—in short, all that part of Central Africa lying between the valley of the Rufiji south and the Victoria Nyanza north, and the mean altitude of this broad upland cannot exceed four thousand five hundred feet. From Mizanza to the Nyanza is a distance of nearly three hundred geographical miles; yet, at no part of this long journey did the aneroids indicate a higher altitude than five thousand one hundred feet above the sea.
"As far as Urimi, from the eastern edge of the plateau, the land is covered with a dense jungle of acacias, which, by its density, strangles all other species of vegetation. Here and there, only in the cleft of a rock, a giant euphorbia may be seen, sole lord of its sterile domain. The soil is shallow, and consists of vegetable mould, mixed largely with sand and detritus of the bare rocks, which crown each knoll and ridge, and which testify too plainly to the violence of the periodical rains.
"In the basin of Matongo, in Southern Urimi, we were instructed by the ruins and ridges, relics of a loftier upland, of what has been effected by nature in the course of long ages. No learned geological savant need ever expound to the traveler who views these rocky ruins, the geological history of this country. From a distance we viewed the glistening naked and riven rocks as a singular scene; but when we stood among them, and noted the appearance of the rocky fragments of granite, gneiss and porphyry peeled as it were rind after rind, or leaf after leaf, like an artichoke, until the rock was wasted away, it seemed as if Dame Nature has left these relics, these hilly skeletons, to demonstrate her laws and career. It seemed to me as if she said, 'Lo, and behold this broad basin of Matongo, with its teeming villages and herds of cattle and fields of corn, surrounded by these bare rocks—in primeval time this land was covered with water, it was the bed of a vast sea. The waters were dried, leaving a wide expanse of level land, upon which I caused heavy rains to fall five months out of each year during all the ages that have elapsed since first the hot sunshine fell upon the soil. The rains washed away the loose sand and made deep furrows in course of time, until in certain places the rocky kernel under the soil began to appear. The furrows became enlarged, the waters frittered away their banks and conveyed the earth away to lower levels, through which it wore away a channel, first through the soil and lastly through the rock itself, which you may see if you but walk to the bottom of that basin. You will there behold a channel worn through the solid rock some fifty feet in depth; and as you look on that you will have some idea of the power and force of the tropical rains. It is through that channel that the soil robbed from these rocks has been carried away toward the Nyanza to fill its depths and in time make dry land of it. Now you may ask how came these once solid rocks, which are now but skeletons of hills and stony heaps, to be thus split into so many fragments? Have you never seen the effect of water thrown upon lime? The solid rocks have been broken or peeled in an almost similar manner. The tropic sun heated the face of these rocks to an intense heat, and the cold rain falling upon the heated surface caused them to split and peel as you see them.'
"This is really the geological history of this region simply told. Ridge after ridge, basin after basin, from Western Ugogo to the Nyanza, tells the same tale; but it is not until we enter Central Urimi, that we begin to marvel at the violence of the process by which nature has transformed the face of the land. For here the perennial springs and rivulets begin to unite and form rivers, after collecting and absorbing the moisture from the water-shed; and these rivers, though but gentle streams during the dry season, become formidable during the rains. It is in Central Urimi that the Nile first begins to levy tribute upon Equatorial Africa, and if you look upon the map and draw a line east from the latitude of Ujiji to longitude thirty-five degrees you will strike upon the sources of the Leewumbu, which is the extreme southern feeder of the Victoria Nyanza.
"In Iramba, between Mgongo Tembo and Mombiti, we came upon what must have been in former times an arm of the Victoria Nyanza. It is called the Lumamberri Plain, after a river of that name, and is about forty miles in width. Its altitude is three thousand seven hundred and seventy-five feet above the sea and but a few feet above Victoria Nyanza. We were fortunate in crossing the broad, shallow stream in the dry season, for during the masika or rainy season the plain is converted into a wide lake.
"The Leewumbu River, after a course of a hundred and seventy-five miles, becomes known as the Monaugh River, in Usukuma. After another run of a hundred miles, it is converted into Shimeeyu, under which name it enters the Victoria east of this port of Kagehyi. Roughly the Shimeeyu may be said to have a length of three hundred and fifty miles."