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Updated: June 16, 2025
It was the home of the winds, which starting here and sweeping down the precipitous slopes and solitary peaks on the western side, and gathering strength as they rushed through the prairie-like Marenga Mkali, howled through Ugogo and Unyamwezi with the force of a storm, It was also the home of the dews, where sprang the clear springs which cheered by their music the bosky dells below, and enriched the populous district of Mpwapwa.
The 4th of April, after sending Bombay and my friendly Mgogo with eight doti, or thirty-two yards of cloth, as a farewell tribute to the Sultan, we struck off through the jungle, and in five hours we were on the borders of the wilderness of "Marenga Mkali" the "hard," bitter or brackish, water.
The view was not such as I expected. I had imagined a plateau several hundred feet higher than Marenga Mkali, and an expansive view which should reveal Ugogo and its characteristics at once.
Milk and honey were plentiful, and three frasilah of sweet potatoes were bought for a shukka, equal to about 40 cents of our money. The 13th June brought us to the last village of Magunda Mkali, in the district of Jiweh la Singa, after a short march of eight miles and three-quarters. Kusuri so called by the Arabs is called Konsuli by the Wakimbu who inhabit it.
Besides the water of the lake partook slightly of the bitter nature of the Matamombo creek, distant fifteen miles, and in a still lesser degree of that of Marenga Mkali, forty miles off. Towards the end of the first day of our halt the Hindi cooper Jako arrived in camp, alleging as an excuse, that feeling fatigued he had fallen asleep in some bushes a few feet from the roadside.
The second had shot a thief in the forest between Pembera Pereh and Kididimo; the fourth had lost a bale in the jungle of Marenga Mkali, and the porter who carried it had received a "very sore head" from a knob stick wielded by one of the thieves, who prowl about the jungle near the frontier of Ugogo.
Besides, the immediate neighbourhood of the lake was too tame to call forth any enthusiasm; there were no grandly swelling mountains, no smiling landscapes nothing but a dun-brown peak, about one thousand feet high above the surface of the lake at its western extremity, from which the lake derived its name, Ugombo; nothing but a low dun-brown irregular range, running parallel with its northern shore at the distance of a mile; nothing but a low plain stretching from its western shore far away towards the Mpwapwa Mountains and Marenga Mkali, then apparent to us from our coign of vantage, from which extensive scene of dun-brownness we were glad to rest our eyes on the quiet grey water beneath.
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