Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/111

 dale alternate with the plateaux; but during the rainy season the land is mostly flooded or changed to a swamp. All the villages and cultivated tract« have had to be distributed over the uplands, the intervening valleys being utilised only as grazing lands during the dry season. The hills consist of granites clothed hero and there with a thin layer of vegetable humus, sufficient to support a little brushwood.

East of the inland sea the soil, being less copiously watered, is strewn with brackish or saline depressions, while farther north a large space between the Victoria and Albert hikes is occupied by fresh water morasses, thicketa of the nenuphar plant, sluggish streams flowing in broad winding beds. Although the Victoria Nyanza is intersected by the equator, the normal heats are tempered by the elevation of the land, by the free passage it offers to every atmospheric current, and by the arborescent vegetation fostered by the tropical rains. Hence the high temperatures prevalent in Nubia, twenty degrees north of the equator, are unknown in this favoured region. Systematic observations made at Rubaga, capital of U-Ganda, just north of the line, show that the epithet of "torrid" is inapplicable to the climate of these countries. The glass never rose above 95° F. or fell below 51°, the mean between these extremes being about 79° for the whole year. This is the temperature of Canton, Tunis, and New Orleans, and is much lower than that of Cairo, Bagdad, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, not to speak of such sultry places as Bushir, Mascat, Karachi, Bistra, or Murzuk, &c.

The prevailing winds are from the south and south-east, attracted by the rarefied air of the Sahara. Storms, which nearly always take place about the same hour in the afternoon, are generally the result of a collision between these southern currents and others from the north and north-west. In this region, which corresponds with that of the "Black Cauldron" in the Atlantic, heavy rains prevail throughout the year, except perhaps in July, which is a comparatively dry month. The greatest downpours are in September, October, and November, and again in April, although according to Wilson the mean annual rainfall does not exceed 50 inches in U-Ganda, where there are no lofty ranges to intercept the moisture-charged clouds. The months are here marked by no transitions of heat and cold, and as the rainy seasons of autumn and spring are the most conspicuous phenomena of the solar year, the people of U-Ganda have taken as the natural- divisions of time these epochs, which also coincide with their agricultural divisions. Hence their years are only half the length of ours, each consisting of six months, the first of which is called the "sowing month," the five others the "eating months." Favoured by an abundant rainfall, the flora is very rich in the fertile regions encircling Lake Victoria, where the soil consists of vegetable humus resting on a red clay mixed with sand some 35 feet thick. In U-Ganda about the equator there is no break in the verdure which everywhere clothes the land. The banana and other plantations, forming extensive gardens in which the villages are embowered