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kept on until nightfall, when we waited an hour or two for the appearing of the moon, by the light of which we intended to continue our journey. In a few minutes the prairie, which but an hour before had been loneliness itself, the silence only broken by the incessant chirping of the grass crickets, or the call of some night-bird, or the weird, dismal howling of the hyenas, was suddenly blazing with a hundred fires, and loud with the crackling of dry fuel, and the laughter and ceaseless chatter of our five hundred porters. A few hours later solitude again resumed her reign, and the scene relapsed into the silence from which it had been so strangely awakened. Wearied with our long night march, we were glad indeed as the dawn broke to find ourselves entering upon Ugogo.
Ugogo is a succession of great bare plains, enclosed by hills, rising abruptly from the level of the plain, which is studded here and there with the enormous baobab or "embuyu" trees, and at frequent intervals the small villages or " tembes " of the people. These are long, narrow, low, mud-roofed buildings forming an enclosed square, into the centre of which the cattle are driven at night. A "tembe " may contain from two to twenty families, according to its size. The architecture of Ugogo is the poorest attempt at house-building I have ever met with, except the grass huts of the handsome Watusi or Wahuma herdsmen.
The Wagogo, like the Masai have large herds of cattle, but they cultivate the ground extensively, while