light green grass covers meadow-lands on the Quango, which here and there glances out in the sun as it wends its way to the north.  The opposite side of this great valley appears like a range of lofty mountains, and the descent into it about a mile, which, measured perpendicularly, may be from a thousand to twelve hundred feet.  Emerging from the gloomy forests of Londa, this magnificent prospect made us all feel as if a weight had been lifted off our eyelids.  A cloud was passing across the middle of the valley, from which rolling thunder pealed, while above all was glorious sunlight; and when we went down to the part where we saw it passing, we found that a very heavy thunder-shower had fallen under the path of the cloud; and the bottom of the valley, which from above seemed quite smooth, we discovered to be intersected and furrowed by great numbers of deep-cut streams.  Looking back from below, the descent appears as the edge of a table-land, with numerous indented dells and spurs jutting out all along, giving it a serrated appearance.  Both the top and sides of the sierra are covered with trees, but large patches of the more perpendicular parts are bare, and exhibit the red soil, which is general over the region we have now entered.

The hollow affords a section of this part of the country; and we find that the uppermost stratum is the ferruginous conglomerate already mentioned.  The matrix is rust of iron (or hydrous peroxide of iron and hematite), and in it are imbedded water-worn pebbles of sandstone and quartz.  As this is the rock underlying the soil of a large part of Londa, its formation must have preceded the work of denudation by an arm of the sea, which washed away the enormous mass of matter required before the valley of Cassange could assume its present form.  The strata under the conglomerate are all of red clay shale of different degrees of hardness, the most indurated being at the bottom.  This red clay shale is named “keele” in Scotland, and has always been considered as an indication of gold; but the only thing we discovered was that it had given rise to a very slippery clay soil, so different from that which we had just left that Mashauana, who always prided himself on being an adept at balancing himself in the canoe on water, and so sure of foot on land that he could afford to express contempt for any one less gifted, came down in a very sudden and undignified manner, to the delight of all whom he had previously scolded for falling.

Here we met with the bamboo as thick as a man’s arm, and many new trees.  Others, which we had lost sight of since leaving Shinte, now reappeared; but nothing struck us more than the comparative scragginess of the trees in this hollow.  Those on the high lands we had left were tall and straight; here they were stunted, and not by any means so closely planted together.  The only way I could account for this was by supposing, as the trees were of different species, that the greater altitude suited the nature of those above better than the lower altitude did the other species below.