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Updated: July 17, 2025
The water of Chunyo is eminently bad, in fact it is its saline-nitrous nature which has given the name Marenga Mkali bitter water to the wilderness which separates Usagara from Ugogo. Though extremely offensive to the palate, Arabs and the natives drink it without fear, and without any bad results; but they are careful to withhold their baggage animals from the pits.
However, in the neighbourhood of the first village a glimpse at some of the peculiar features of Ugogo was obtained, and there was a vast plain now flat, now heaving upwards, here level as a table, there tilted up into rugged knolls bristling with scores of rough boulders of immense size, which lay piled one above another as if the children of a Titanic race had been playing at house-building.
Monkeys and rhinoceroses, besides kudus, steinboks, and antelopes, were numerous in the vicinity. At this camp my little dog "Omar" died of inflammation of the bowels, almost on the threshold of the country Ugogo where his faithful watchfulness would have been invaluable to me. The next day's march was also fifteen miles in length, through one interminable jungle of thorn-bushes.
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.
Their only dress consist of a strip of cloth round the waist. Captain Grant was here seized with fever, and the sickness of the Hottentots much increased. A long day's march from the hilly Usagara country led the party into the comparatively level land of Ugogo. Food was scarce, the inhabitants living on the seed of the calabash to save their stores of grain.
For this reason, being the leader of the caravans, so far as he was able we were very sure not to be delayed in Ugogo, where food was so dear. The day we arrived at Nyambwa will be remembered by Hamed as long as he lives, for the trouble and vexation which he suffered.
Once more the whole caravan moved on; but as I had to pay each of the seventy slaves sixteen yards of cloth, by order of their masters, in the simple matter of expenditure it would have been better had I thrown ten loads away at Ugogo, where my difficulties first commenced.
Sheikh Hamed, who was elected guider of the united caravans now travelling through Ugogo, was of such a fragile and small make, that he might be taken for an imitation of his famous prototype "Dapper." Being of such dimensions, what he lacked for weight and size he made up by activity.
At the same time reports from the other side came in, to the effect that the Arabs at Kaze and Msene had bribed the Watuta to join them, and overrun the whole country from Ugogo to Usui; and, in consequence of this, all the natives on the line I should have to take were in such dread of that terrible wandering race of savages, who had laid waste in turn all the lands from N'yassa to Usui on their west flank, that not a soul dared leave his home.
This no sooner got noised over the camp than all my Wanyamuezi porters, who had friends in Ugogo, left to live with them, and would not come back again even when the "storm had blown over," because they did not like the incessant rains that half deluged the camp.
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