His kingdom covers on the map a vast but ill-defined area, stretching on the west into the Kalahari Desert, and on the north-west into the thinly peopled country round Lake Ngami, where various small tribes live in practical independence. Sovereignty among African natives is tribal rather than territorial. Khama is the chief of the Bamangwato, rather than ruler of a country, and where the Bamangwato dwell there Khama reigns. A large proportion of them dwell in or near Palapshwye. Born about 1830, he is by far the most remarkable Kafir now living in South Africa, for he has shown a tact, prudence, and tenacity of purpose which would have done credit to a European statesman. He was converted to Christianity while still a boy, and had much persecution to endure at the hands of his heathen father, who at last banished him for refusing to take a second wife. What is not less remarkable, he has carried his Christianity into practice, evincing both a sense of honour as well as a humanity which has made him the special protector of the old and the weak, and even of the Bushmen who serve the Bamangwato. Regarded as fighters, his people are far inferior to the Matabili, and he was often in danger of being overpowered by the fierce and rapacious Lo Bengula. As early as 1862 he crossed assagais with and defeated a Matabili impi (war-band), earning the praise of the grim Mosilikatze, who said, "Khama is a man. There is no other man among the Bamangwato." Though frequently thereafter threatened and sometimes attacked, he succeeded, by his skilful policy, in avoiding any serious war until the fall of Lo Bengula in 1893. Seeing the tide of white conquest rising all round him, he has had a difficult problem to face, and it is not surprising that he has been less eager to welcome the Company and its railway than those who considered him the white man's friend had expected. The coming of the whites means not only the coming of liquor, but the gradual occupation of the large open tracts where the natives have hunted and pastured their cattle, with a consequent change in their mode of life, which, inevitable as it may be, a patriotic chief must naturally wish to delay.

Palapshwye, the largest native town south of the Zambesi, is an immense mass of huts, planted without the smallest attempt at order over the sandy hill slope, some two square miles in extent. The huts are small, with low walls of clay and roofs of grass, so that from a distance the place looks like a wilderness of beehives. Each of the chief men has his own hut and those of his wives inclosed in a rough fence of thorns, or perhaps of prickly-pear, and between the groups of huts lie open spaces of sand or dusty tracks. In the middle of the town close to the huts of Khama himself, who, however, being a Christian, has but one wife, stands the great kraal or kothla. It is an inclosure some three hundred yards in circumference, surrounded by a stockade ten feet high, made of dry trunks and boughs of trees stuck in the ground so close together that one could not even shoot a gun, or hurl an assagai through them. The stockade might resist the first attack of native enemies if the rest of the town had been captured, but it would soon yield to fire. In the middle of it stands the now dry trunk of an old tree, spared when the other trees were cut down to make the kraal, because it was supposed to have magical powers, and heal those who touched it. A heap of giraffe skins lay piled against it, but its healing capacity now finds less credit, at least among those who wish to stand well with the chief. Within this inclosure Khama holds his general assemblies when he has some address to deliver to the people or some ordinance to proclaim. He administers criminal justice among his subjects, and decides their civil disputes, usually with the aid of one or two elderly counsellors. He has tried to improve their agricultural methods, and being fond of horses has formed a good stud. Unhappily, in 1896, the great murrain descended upon the Bamangwato, and Khama and his tribe lost nearly all the cattle (said to have numbered eight hundred thousand) in which their wealth consisted.

The British magistrate—there are about seventy Europeans living in the town—described these Bechuanas as a quiet folk, not hard to manage. They have less force of character and much less taste for fighting than Zulus or Matabili. The main impression which they leave on a stranger is that of laziness. Of the many whom we saw hanging about in the sun, hardly one seemed to be doing any kind of work. Nor do they. They grow a few mealies (maize), but it is chiefly the women who hoe and plant the ground. They know how to handle wire and twist it round the handles of the sjamboks (whips of hippopotamus hide). But having few wants and no ambition, they have practically no industries, and spend their lives in sleeping, loafing, and talking. When one watches such a race, it seems all the more strange that a man of such remarkable force of character as Khama should suddenly appear among them.[45]

For about sixty miles north-eastward from Palapshwye the country continues dull, dry, and mostly level. After that rocky hills appear, and in the beds of the larger streams a little water is seen. At Tati, ninety miles from Palapshwye (nearly four hundred from Mafeking), gold reefs have been worked at intervals for five and twenty years, under a concession originally granted (1869), by Lo Bengula, and a little European settlement has grown up. Here one passes from Bechuanaland into the territories which belonged to the Matabili, and now to the British South Africa Company. The country rises and grows more picturesque. The grass is greener on the pastures. New trees appear, some of them bearing beautiful flowers, and the air is full of tales of lions. For, in Africa, where there is more grass there is more game, and where there is more game there are more beasts of prey. Lions, we were told, had last week dragged a Kafir from beneath a waggon where he was sleeping. Lions had been seen yester eve trotting before the coach. Lions would probably be seen again to-morrow. But to us the beast was always a lion of yesterday or a lion of to-morrow, never a lion of to-day. The most direct evidence we had of his presence was when, some days later, we were shown a horse on which that morning a lion had sprung, inflicting terrible wounds. The rider was not touched, and galloped the poor animal back to camp. At Mangwe, a pretty little station with exceptionally bad sleeping quarters, the romantic part of the country may be said to begin. All round there are rocky kopjes, and the track which leads northward follows a line of hollows between them, called the Mangwe Pass, a point which was of much strategical importance in the Matabili war of 1893, and became again of so much importance in the recent native rising (1896) that one of the first acts of the British authorities was to construct a rough fort in it and place a garrison there. Oddly enough, the insurgents did not try to occupy it, and thereby cut off the English in Matabililand from their railway base at Mafeking, the reason being, as I was informed, that the Molimo, or prophet, whose incitements contributed to the insurrection, had told them that it was by the road through this pass that the white strangers would quit the country for ever.

A more peaceful spot could not be imagined than the pass was when we passed through it at 5 A.M., "under the opening eyelids of the dawn." Smooth green lawns, each surrounded by a fringe of wood, and filled with the songs of awakening birds, lay beneath the beetling crags of granite,—granite whose natural grey was hidden by brilliant red and yellow lichens,—and here and there a clear streamlet trickled across the path. Climbing to the top of one of these rocky masses, I enjoyed a superb view to north, west, and east, over a wilderness of rugged hills, with huge masses of grey rock rising out of a feathery forest, while to the north the undulating line, faintly blue in the far distance, marked the point where the plateau of central Matabililand begins to decline toward the valley of the Zambesi. It was a beautiful prospect both in the wild variety of the foreground and in the delicate hues of ridge after ridge melting away towards the horizon, and it was all waste and silent, as it has been since the world began.

The track winds through the hills for some six or eight miles before it emerges on the more open country. These kopjes, which form a sort of range running east-south-east and west-north-west, are the Matoppo Hills, in which the main body of the Matabili and other insurgent natives held their ground during the months of April, May and June, 1896. Although the wood is not dense, by no means so hard to penetrate as the bush or low scrub which baffled the British troops in the early Kafir wars, waged on the eastern border of Cape Colony, still the ground is so very rough, and the tumbled masses of rock which lie round the foot of the granite kopjes afford so many spots for hiding, that the agile native, who knows the ground, had a far better chance against the firearms of the white men than he could have had in the open country where the battles of 1893 took place. Seeing such a country one can well understand that it was quite as much by famine as by fighting that the rising of 1896 was brought to an end.

From the northern end of the Mangwe Pass it is over forty miles to Bulawayo, the goal of our journey, and the starting-point for our return journey to the coast of the Indian Ocean. But Bulawayo is too important a place to be dealt with at the end of a chapter already sufficiently long.

[Footnote 40: "Already night saw all the stars of the other pole, and ours brought so low that it rose not from the surface of the sea."]

[Footnote 41: Called after Constance, wife of Governor Adrian van der Stel.]

[Footnote 42: Nimble climbers will do well to descend from the top down a grand cleft in the rocks, very narrow and extremely steep, which is called the Great Kloof. At its bottom, just behind Cape Town, one sees in a stream-bed the granite rock on which the horizontal strata of sandstone that form Table Mountain rest.]

[Footnote 43: Here, in December, 1896, the natives rose in revolt, exasperated by the slaughter of their cattle, though that slaughter was the only method of checking the progress of the cattle plague.]

[Footnote 44: There is also a weaker kind made, intoxicating only if consumed in very large quantity.]

[Footnote 45: For most of what is here stated regarding Khama I am indebted to an interesting little book by the late Bishop Knight-Bruce, entitled Khama, an African Chief.]



CHAPTER XV

FROM BULAWAYO TO FORT SALISBURY—MATABILILAND AND MASHONALAND

Bulawayo means, in the Zulu tongue, the place of slaughter, and under the sway of Lo Bengula it deserved its name. Just sixty years ago Mosilikatze, chief of the Matabili, driven out of what is now the Transvaal Republic by the Dutch Boers who had emigrated from Cape Colony, fled four hundred miles to the north-west and fell like a sudden tempest upon the Makalakas and other feeble tribes who pastured their cattle in this remote region. His tribe was not large, but every man was a tried warrior. The Makalakas were slaughtered or chased away or reduced to slavery, and when Mosilikatze died in 1870, his son Lo Bengula succeeded to the most powerful kingdom in South Africa after that of Cetewayo, chief of the Zulus. Of the native town which grew up round the king's kraal there is now not a trace—all was destroyed in 1893. The kraal itself, which Lo Bengula fired when he fled away, has gone, and only one old tree marks the spot where the king used to sit administering justice to his subjects. A large part of this justice consisted in decreeing death to those among his indunas or other prominent men who had excited his suspicions or whose cattle he desired to appropriate. Sometimes he had them denounced—"smelt out," they called it—by the witch-doctors as guilty of practising magic against him. Sometimes he dispensed with a pretext, and sent a messenger to the hut of the doomed man to tell him the king wanted him. The victim, often ignorant of his fate, walked in front, while the executioner, following close behind, suddenly dealt him with the knob-kerry, or heavy-ended stick, one tremendous blow, which crushed his skull and left him dead upon the ground. Women, on the other hand, were strangled.[46] No one disputed the despot's will, for the Matabili, like other Zulus, show to their king the absolute submission of soldiers to their general, while the less martial tribes, such as the Bechuanas and Basutos, obey the chief only when he has the sentiment of the tribe behind him. One thing, however, the king could not do. He owned a large part of all the cattle of the tribe, and he assumed the power to grant concessions to dig for minerals. But the land belonged to the whole tribe by right of conquest, and he had no power to alienate it.

Moved by the associations of the ancient capital, Mr. Rhodes directed the residence of the Administrator, Government House, as it is called, to be built on the site of Lo Bengula's kraal. But the spot was not a convenient one for the creation of a European town, for it was a good way from any stream, and there was believed to be a valuable gold-reef immediately under it. Accordingly, a new site was chosen, on somewhat lower ground, about two miles to the south-west. Here new Bulawayo stands, having risen with a rapidity rivalling that of a mining-camp in Western America. The site has no natural beauty, for the landscape is dull, with nothing to relieve its monotonous lines except the hill of Tsaba Induna, about fifteen miles distant to the east. The ground on which the town stands, sloping gently to the south, is bare, dusty, and wind-swept, like the country all round. However, the gum-trees, planted in the beginning of 1894, when the streets were laid out, had already shot up to twelve or fifteen feet in height and began to give some little shade. Brick houses were rising here and there among the wooden shanties and the sheds of corrugated iron. An opera house was talked of, and already the cricket-ground and racecourse, without which Englishmen cannot be happy, had been laid out. Town lots, or "stands," as they are called in South Africa, had gone up to prices which nothing but a career of swift and brilliant prosperity could justify. However, that prosperity seemed to the inhabitants of Bulawayo to be assured. Settlers kept flocking in. Storekeepers and hotel-keepers were doing a roaring trade. Samples of ore were every day being brought in from newly explored gold-reefs, and all men's talk was of pennyweights, or even ounces, to the ton. Everybody was cheerful, because everybody was hopeful. It was not surprising. There is something intoxicating in the atmosphere of a perfectly new country, with its undeveloped and undefined possibilities: and the easy acquisition of this spacious and healthful land, the sudden rise of this English town, where two years before there had been nothing but the huts of squalid savages, had filled every one with a delightful sense of the power of civilized man to subjugate the earth and draw from it boundless wealth. Perhaps something may also be set down to the climate. Bulawayo is not beautiful. Far more attractive sites might have been found among the hills to the south. But it has a deliciously fresh, keen brilliant air, with a strong breeze tempering the sun-heat, and no risk of fever. Indeed, nearly all this side of Matabililand is healthful, partly because it has been more thickly peopled of late years than the eastern side of the country, which was largely depopulated by the Matabili raids.

Next to the prospects of the gold-reefs (a topic to which I shall presently return), the question in which a visitor in 1895 felt most interest was the condition of the natives. It seemed too much to expect that a proud and warlike race of savages should suddenly, within less than two years from the overthrow of their king, have abandoned all notion of resistance to the whites and settled down as peaceable subjects. The whites were a mere handful scattered over an immense area of country, and the white police force did not exceed four or five hundred men. Nevertheless, the authorities of the British South Africa Company were of opinion that peace had been finally secured, and that no danger remained from the natives. They observed that, while the true Matabili who remained in the country—for some had fled down to or across the Zambesi after the defeats of 1893—were comparatively few in number, the other natives, mostly Makalakas,[47] were timid and unwarlike. They held that when a native tribe has been once completely overcome in fight, it accepts the inevitable with submission. And they dwelt on the fact that Lo Bengula's tyranny had been a constant source of terror to his own subjects. After his flight some of his leading indunas came to Dr. Jameson and said, "Now we can sleep." This confidence was shared by all the Europeans in the country. English settlers dwelt alone without a shade of apprehension in farms, six, eight, or ten miles from another European. In the journey I am describing from Mafeking to Fort Salisbury, over eight hundred miles of lonely country, my wife and I were accompanied only by my driver, a worthy Cape Dutchman named Renske, and by a native "Cape boy." None of us was armed, and no one of the friends we consulted as to our trip even suggested that I should carry so much as a revolver, or that the slightest risk was involved in taking a lady through the country. How absolutely secure the Administrator at Bulawayo felt was shown by his sending the Matabililand mounted police (those who afterwards marched into the Transvaal) to Pitsani, in southern Bechuanaland, in November, leaving the country denuded of any force to keep order.

It is easy to be wise after the event. The confidence of the Europeans in the submissiveness of the natives is now seen to have been ill founded. Causes of discontent were rife among them, which, at first obscure, became subsequently clear. Two of these causes were already known at the time of my visit, though their seriousness was under-estimated. In Mashonaland the natives disliked the tax of ten shillings for each hut, which there, as in the Transvaal Republic,[48] they have been required to pay; and they complained that it was apt to fall heavily on the industrious Kafir, because the idle one escaped, having nothing that could be taken in payment of it. This tax was sometimes levied in kind, sometimes in labour, but by preference in money when the hut-owner had any money, for the Company desired to induce the natives to earn wages. If he had not, an ox was usually taken in pledge. In Matabililand many natives, I was told, felt aggrieved that the Company had claimed the ownership of and the right to take to itself all the cattle, as having been (in the Company's view) the property of Lo Bengula, although many of these had, in fact, been left in the hands of the indunas, and a large part were, in December, 1895, distributed among the natives as their own property. Subsequent inquiries have shown that this grievance was deeply and widely felt. As regards the land, there was evidently the material out of which a grievance might grow, but the grievance did not seem to have yet actually arisen. The land was being sold off in farms, and natives squatting on a piece of land so sold might be required by the purchaser to clear out. However, pains were taken, I was told, to avoid including native villages in any farm sold. Often it would not be for the purchaser's interest to eject the natives, because he might get labourers among them, and labour is what is most wanted. Two native reservations had been laid out, but the policy of the Company was to keep the natives scattered about among the whites rather than mass them in the reservations. Under Lo Bengula there had been no such thing as private ownership of land. The land was "nationalized," and no individual Kafir was deemed to have any permanent and exclusive right even to the piece of it which he might be at the time cultivating. While he actually did cultivate he was not disturbed, for the simple reason that there was far more land than the people could or would cultivate. The natives, although they till the soil, are still half-nomads. They often shift their villages, and even when the village remains they seldom cultivate the same patch for long together. Though Europeans had been freely buying the land, they bought largely to hold for a rise and sell again, and comparatively few of the farms bought had been actually stocked with cattle, while, of course, the parts under tillage were a mere trifle. Hence there did not seem to have been as yet any pressure upon the natives, who, though they vastly outnumber the Europeans, are very few in proportion to the size of the country. I doubt if in the whole territory of the Company south of the Zambesi River there are 1,000,000. To these possible sources of trouble there was added one now perceived to have been still graver. Native labour was needed not only for public works, but by private persons for mining operations. As the number of Kafirs who came willingly was insufficient, the indunas were required to furnish stout young men to work; and according to Mr. Selous,[49] who was then living in the country, force was often used to bring them in. Good wages were given; but the regulations were irksome, and the native police, who were often employed to bring in the labourers, seem to have abused their powers. To the genuine Matabili, who lived only for war and plunder, and had been accustomed to despise the other tribes, work, and especially mine work, was not only distasteful, but degrading. They had never been really subdued. In 1893 they hid away most of the firearms they possessed, hoping to use them again. Now, when their discontent had increased, two events hastened an outbreak. One was the removal of the white police to Pitsani. Only forty-four were left in Matabililand to keep order. The other was the appearance of a frightful murrain among the cattle, which made it necessary for the Company to order the slaughter even of healthy animals in order to stop the progress of the contagion. The plague had come slowly down through German and Portuguese East Africa, propagated, it is said, by the wild animals, especially buffaloes. Some kinds of wild game are as liable to it as domesticated oxen are, and on the Upper Zambesi in September, 1896, so large a part of the game had died that the lions, mad with hunger, were prowling round the native kraals and making it dangerous to pass from village to village. This new and unlooked for calamity created a ferment in the minds of the natives. The slaughter of their cattle seemed to them an act of injustice. Just when they were terrified at this calamity (which, it was reported, had been sent up among them by Lo Bengula, or his ghost, from the banks of the Zambesi) and incensed at this apparent injustice, coming on the top of their previous visitation, the news of the defeat and surrender of the Company's police force in the Transvaal spread among them. They saw the white government defenceless, and its head, Dr. Jameson, whose kindliness had impressed those who knew him personally, no longer among them. Then, under the incitements of a prophet, came the revolt.

This, however, is a digression. In October, 1895, we travelled, unarmed and unconcerned, by night as well as by day, through villages where five months later the Kafirs rose and murdered every European within reach. So entirely unsuspected was the already simmering disaffection.

The native question which occupied Bulawayo in September, 1895, was that native-labour question which, in one form or another, is always present to South African minds. All hard labour, all rough and unskilled labour, is, and, owing to the heat of the climate as well as the scarcity of white men, must be, done by blacks; and in a new country like Matabililand the blacks, though they can sometimes be induced to till the land, are most averse to working under ground. They are only beginning to use money, and they do not want the things which money buys. The wants of a native living with his tribe and cultivating mealies or Kafir corn are confined to a kaross (skin cloak) or some pieces of cotton cloth. The prospect of leaving his tribe to go and work in a mine, in order that he may earn wages wherewith he can buy things he has no use for, does not at once appeal to him. The white men, anxious to get to work on the gold-reefs, are annoyed at what they call the stupidity and laziness of the native, and usually clamour for legislation to compel the natives to come and work, adding, of course, that regular labour would be the best thing in the world for the natives. Some go so far as to wish to compel them to work at a fixed rate of wages, sufficient to leave a good profit for the employer. Others go even further, and as experience has shown that the native does not fear imprisonment as a penalty for leaving his work, desire the infliction of another punishment which he does fear—that is, the lash. Such monstrous demands seem fitter for the mouths of Spaniards in the sixteenth century than for Englishmen in the nineteenth. The difficulty of getting labour is incident to a new country, and must be borne with. In German East Africa it has been so much felt that the Administrator of that region has proposed to import Indian labour, as the sugar-planters of Natal, and as those of Trinidad and Demerara in the West Indies, have already done. But it is to some extent a transitory difficulty. The mines at Kimberley succeed in drawing plenty of native labour; so do the mines on the Witwatersrand; so in time the mine-owners in Matabililand may hope to do also. They must, however, be prepared, until a regular afflux of labourers has been set up, to offer, as the Kimberley people do, wages far in excess of anything the Kafirs could possibly gain among their own people, in order to overcome the distaste of the native—a very natural distaste, due to centuries of indolence in a hot climate—to any hard and continuous toil. This is no great compensation to make to those whose land they have taken and whose primitive way of life they have broken up and for ever destroyed. But once the habit of coming to work for wages has been established in these northern regions,—and it need not take many years to establish it,—the mining companies will have no great difficulty in getting as much labour as they want, and will not be obliged, as they now are, to try to arrange with a chief for the despatch of some of his "boys."

Bulawayo is the point from which one starts to visit the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, the only very grand natural object which South Africa has to show. The expedition, however, is a much longer one than a glance at the map would suggest. Owing to the prevalence of the tsetse-fly in the valley of the great river, one cannot take oxen without the prospect of losing them, and must therefore travel on foot or with donkeys. The want of a waggon makes camping out much more troublesome and involves a large force of native porters. Thus elaborate preparations are needed, and though the distance, as the crow flies, from Bulawayo to the Falls is only some two hundred miles, at least six weeks are needed for the trip, a space of time we could not spare.

I have described in the last chapter the route from Cape Town to the capital of Matabililand which persons coming from England would naturally take. It is not, however, by any means the shortest route to the sea, and is therefore not the route along which the bulk of the European trade is likely in future to pass. From Cape Town to Bulawayo it is fourteen hundred miles; but from Bulawayo to the port of Beira, on the Indian Ocean, it is only six hundred and fifty miles via Fort Salisbury and Mtali, and will be only about five hundred if a more direct railway line should ever be laid out. I propose to take the reader back to the sea at Beira by this Fort Salisbury and Mtali route, and in following it he will learn something about Mashonaland and the mountains which divide British from Portuguese territory.

Bulawayo is distant from Fort Salisbury two hundred and eighty miles. The journey takes by coach four days and four nights, travelling night and day, with only short halts for meals. An ox-waggon accomplishes it in about three weeks. The track runs nearly all the way along high ground, open, breezy, and healthful, because dry, but seldom picturesque. It is a land of rolling downs, the tops of which are covered with thin grass, while better pastures, and sometimes woods also, are found in the valleys of the streams and on the lower slopes of the hills. The first part of the way, from Bulawayo to the little town of Gwelo, is rather dull. One crosses the Bimbezi River, where the Matabili were finally overthrown in the war of 1893, and the Shangani[50] River, where they suffered their first defeat. The Company's force was advancing along the high open ground to attack Bulawayo, and the native army met them on the road. Both battlefields are bare and open, and one wonders at the folly of the natives who advanced over such ground, exposed to the rifle-fire and the still more deadly Maxim guns of the invaders. Armed in large part only with assagais, they were mown down before they could even reach the front of the British line, and their splendid courage made their destruction all the more complete. Had they stuck to the rocky and woody regions they might have made the war a far longer and more troublesome business than it proved to be. No stone marks either battle-field.

From a spot between the two rivers we turned off to the south to visit the prehistoric remains at Dhlodhlo. It was an extremely lonely track, on which we did not meet a human being for some thirty miles. No house, not even a Kafir hut, was to be found, so we bivouacked in the veldt, to the lee of a clump of thorn-bushes. The earlier part of the nights is delightful at this season (October), but it is apt to get cold between 2 and 4 A.M., and as there is usually a south-east wind blowing, the shelter of a bush or a tall ant-hill is not unwelcome. Whoever enjoys travelling at all cannot but enjoy such a night alone under the stars. One gathers sticks to make the fire, and gets to know which wood burns best. One considers how the scanty supply of water which the waggon carries may be most thriftily used for making the soup, boiling the eggs and brewing the tea. One listens (we listened in vain) for the roar of a distant lion or the still less melodious voice of the hyena. The brilliance of the stars is such that only the fatigue of the long day—for one must always start by or before sunrise to spare the animals during the sultry noon—and the difficulty of sitting down in a great, bare, flat land, where there is not a large stone and seldom even a tree, can drive one into the vehicle to sleep. The meals, consisting of tinned meat and biscuits, with eggs and sometimes a small, lean, and desiccated chicken, are very scanty and very monotonous, but the air is so dry and fresh and bracing that one seems to find meat and drink in it.

Next day we came, at the foot of the Matoppo Hills, to a solitary farm, where we found a bright young Englishman, who, with only one white companion, had established himself in this wilderness and was raising good crops on fields to which he brought water from a neighbouring streamlet. Even the devastation wrought by a flight of locusts had not dispirited him nor diminished his faith in the country. It is not the least of the pleasures of such a journey that one finds so many cheery, hearty, sanguine young fellows scattered about this country, some of them keeping or helping to keep stores, some of them, like our friend here, showing what the soil may be made to do with skill and perseverance, and how homes may be reared upon it. One is always hospitably received; one often finds in the hard-working pioneer or the youth behind the store counter a cultivated and thoughtful mind; one has, perhaps, a glimpse of an attractive personality developing itself under simple yet severe conditions, fitted to bring out the real force of a man. After half an hour's talk you part as if you were parting with an old friend, yet knowing that the same roof is not likely ever to cover both of you again. There are, of course, rough and ill-omened explorers and settlers in South Africa, as in other new countries: but having wandered a good deal, in different countries, on the outer edge of civilization, I was struck by the large proportion of well-mannered and well-educated men whom one came across in this tropical wilderness.

From the young Englishman's farm we turned in among the hills, following the course of the brook, and gently rising till we reached a height from which a superb view to the north unrolled itself. The country was charming, quite unlike the dull brown downs of yesterday. On each side were steep hills, sometimes rocky, sometimes covered thick with wood; between them in the valley a succession of smooth, grassy glades, each circled round by trees. It was rural scenery—scenery in which one could wish to build a cottage and dwell therein, or in which a pastoral drama might be laid. There was nothing to suggest Europe, for the rocks and, still more, the trees were thoroughly African in character, and the air even drier and keener than that of Sicily. But the landscape was one which any lover of Theocritus might have come to love; and some day, when there are large towns in Matabililand, and plenty of Englishmen living in them, the charm of these hills will be appreciated. The valley rises at last to a grassy table-land, where, on a boss of granite rock, stand the ancient walls of Dhlodhlo, which we had come to see. I have already described the ruins (see Chapter IX), which are scanty enough, and interesting, not from any beauty they possess, but because we have so few data for guessing at their purpose or the race that built them. The country is now very solitary, and the natives fear to approach the ruins, especially at night, believing them to be haunted. Having spent some hours in examining them, we were just starting when a swarm of locusts passed, the first we had seen. It is a strange sight, beautiful if you can forget the destruction it brings with it. The whole air, to twelve or even eighteen feet above the ground, is filled with the insects, reddish brown in body, with bright gauzy wings. When the sun's rays catch them it is like the sea sparkling with light. When you see them against a cloud they are like the dense flakes of a driving snow-storm. You feel as if you had never before realized immensity in number. Vast crowds of men gathered at a festival, countless tree-tops rising along the slope of a forest ridge, the chimneys of London houses from the top of St. Paul's,—all are as nothing to the myriads of insects that blot out the sun above and cover the ground beneath and fill the air whichever way one looks. The breeze carries them swiftly past, but they come on in fresh clouds, a host of which there is no end, each of them a harmless creature which you can catch and crush in your hand, but appalling in their power of collective devastation. Yet here in southern Matabililand there had been only a few swarms. We were to see later on, in the eastern mountain region, far more terrible evidences of their presence.

From Dhlodhlo we drove to the store on the Shangani River, a distance of twenty miles or more, right across the open veldt, finding our way, with the aid of a native boy, over stony hills and thick shrubs, and even here and there across marshy stream beds, in a way which astonishes the European accustomed to think that roads, or at least beaten tracks, are essential to four-wheeled vehicles. I have driven in an open cart across the central watershed of the Rocky Mountains; but the country there, rough as it is, is like a paved road compared with some parts of the veldt over which the South African guides his team. Once or twice we missed the way in the deepening twilight, and began to prepare ourselves for another night under the stars, with a nearly exhausted food-supply. But at last, just as darkness fell, we reached a native village, and obtained (with difficulty) a native guide for the last few miles of the drive. These miles were lighted by a succession of grass-fires. Such fires are much commoner here than in the prairies of Western America, and, happily, much less dangerous, for the grass is usually short and the fire moves slowly. They are sometimes accidental, but more frequently lighted by the natives for the sake of getting a fresh growth of young grass on the part burned and thereby attracting the game. Sometimes the cause is even slighter. The Kafirs are fond of eating the mice and other small inhabitants of the veldt, and they fire the grass to frighten these little creatures, and catch them before they can reach their holes, with the further convenience of having them ready roasted. Thus at this season nearly half the land on these downs is charred, and every night one sees the glow of a fire somewhere in the distance. The practice strikes a stranger as a wasteful one, exhausting to the soil, and calculated to stunt the trees, because, though the grass is too short to make the fire strong enough to kill a well-grown tree, it is quite able to injure the younger ones and prevent them from ever reaching their due proportions.

The term "store," which I have just used, requires some explanation. There are, of course, no inns in the country, except in the three or four tiny towns. Outside these, sleeping quarters are to be had only in small native huts, built round a sort of primitive "general shop" which some trader has established to supply the wants of those who live within fifty miles or who pass along the road. The hut is of clay, with a roof of thatch, which makes it cooler than the store with its roof of galvanised iron. White ants are usually at work upon the clay walls, sending down little showers of dust upon the sleeper. Each hut contains two rough wooden frames, across which there is stretched, to make a bed, a piece of coarse linen or ticking. Very prudent people turn back the dirty rug or bit of old blanket which covers the bed, and cast a glance upon the clay floor, to see that no black momba or other venomous snake is already in possession. Such night quarters may seem unattractive, but we had many a good night's rest in them. When they are unattainable one camps out.

From the Shangani River to Gwelo the track leads again over a succession of huge, swelling ridges, separated from one another by the valleys of spruits, or streams, now nearly dry, but in the wet season running full and strong. The descent to the spruit, which is often a short, steep pitch and is then called a donga, needs careful driving, and the ascent up the opposite bank is for a heavy waggon a matter of great difficulty. We passed waggons hardly advancing a step, though eight or nine span of oxen were tugging at them, and sometimes saw two three span detached from another team and attached to the one which had failed, unaided, to mount the slope. No wonder that, when the difficulty of bringing up machinery is so great, impatient mine-owners long for the railway.

The first sign that we were close upon Gwelo came from the sight of a number of white men in shirt-sleeves running across a meadow—an unusual sight in South Africa, which presently explained itself as the English inhabitants engaged in a cricket match. Nearly the whole town was either playing or looking on. It was a hot afternoon, but our energetic countrymen were not to be scared by the sun from the pursuit of the national game. They are as much Englishmen in Africa as in England, and, happily for them and for their country, there is no part of the national character that is more useful when transplanted than the fondness for active exercise. Gwelo, a cheerful little place, though it stands in a rather bleak country, with a wooded ridge a little way off to the south, interested me as a specimen of the newest kind of settlement. It is not in strictness a mining camp, for there are no reefs in the immediate neighbourhood, but a mining centre, which proposes to live as the local metropolis of a gold-bearing district, a place of supply and seat of local administration. In October, 1895, it had about fifteen houses inhabited by Europeans and perhaps thirty houses altogether; but the materials for building other houses were already on the ground, and the usual symptoms of a "boom" were discernible. Comparing it with the many similar "new cities" I had seen in Western America, I was much struck with the absence of the most conspicuous features of those cities—the "saloons" and "bars." In California or Montana these establishments, in which the twin deities of gambling and drinking are worshipped with equal devotion, form half the houses of a recent settlement in a mining region. In South Africa, except at and near Johannesburg, one scarcely sees them. Drinking rarely obtrudes itself. What gambling there may be I know not, but at any rate there are no gambling-saloons. Nothing can be more decorous than the aspect of these new African towns, and the conduct of the inhabitants seldom belies the aspect. There is, of course, a free use of alcohol. But there is no shooting, such as goes on in American mining towns: crimes of violence of any kind are extremely rare; and the tracks are safe. No one dreams of taking the precautions against "road-agents" (i.e. highwaymen) which are still far from superfluous in the Western States and were far from superfluous in Australia. Trains are not stopped and robbed; coaches are not "held up." Nothing surprised me more, next to the apparent submissiveness of the native Kafirs, than the order which appeared to prevail among the whites. A little reflection shows that in this northerly part of the country, where travelling is either very slow or very costly and difficult, malefactors would have few chances of escape. But I do not think this is the chief cause of the orderly and law-abiding habits of the people. There have never been any traditions of violence, still less of crime, in South Africa, except as against the natives. The Dutch Boers were steady, solid people, little given to thieving or to killing one another. The English have carried with them their respect for law and authority. In some respects their ethical standard is not that of the mother country. But towards one another and towards those set in authority over them, their attitude is generally correct.

The night we spent at Gwelo gave a curious instance of the variability of this climate. The evening had been warm, but about midnight the S.E. wind rose, bringing a thin drizzle of rain, and next morning the cold was that of Boston or Edinburgh in a bitter north-easter. Having fortunately brought warm cloaks and overcoats, we put on all we had and fastened the canvas curtains round the vehicle. Nevertheless, we shivered all day long, the low thick clouds raining at intervals, and the malign blast chilling one's bones. Gwelo, of course, declared that such weather was quite exceptional; but those can have travelled little indeed who have not remarked how often they encounter "exceptional weather," and Gwelo, having existed for eighteen months only, had at best a small experience to fall back upon. The moral for travellers is: "Do not forget to take your furs and your ulsters to tropical South Africa."

Some forty miles beyond Gwelo there is a mountain called Iron Mine Hill, where the Mashonas have for generations been wont to find and work iron. All or nearly all the Kafir tribes do this, but the Mashonas are more skilful at it than were their conquerors the Matabili. Here a track turns off to the south-east to Fort Victoria, the first military post established by the Company in its territories, and for a time the most important. It has fallen into the background lately, partly because the gold-reefs have not realized the hopes once formed of them, partly because it suffers from fever after the rains. I went to it because from it one visits the famous ruins at Zimbabwye, the most curious relic of prehistoric antiquity yet discovered in tropical Africa. The journey, one hundred miles from Iron Mine Hill to Victoria, is not an easy one, for there are no stores on the way where either provisions or night-quarters can be had, and the track is a bad one, being very little used. The country is well wooded and often pretty, with fantastic, rocky hills rising here and there, but presenting few striking features. Two views, however, dwell in my recollection as characteristic of South Africa. We had slept in a rude hut on the banks of the Shashi River, immediately beneath a rocky kopje, and rose next morning before dawn to continue the journey. Huge rocks piled wildly upon one another towered above the little meadow—rocks covered with lichens of brilliant hues, red, green, and yellow, and glowing under the rays of the level sun. Glossy-leaved bushes nestled in the crevices and covered the mouths of the dens to which the leopards had retired from their nocturnal prowls. One tree stood out against the clear blue on the top of the highest rock. Cliff-swallows darted and twittered about the hollows, while high overhead, in the still morning air, two pairs of large hawks sailed in wide circles round and round the summit of the hill. A few miles farther the track crossed a height from which one could gaze for thirty miles in every direction over a gently rolling country covered with wood, but with broad stretches of pasture interposed, whose grass, bleached to a light yellow, made one think it a mass of cornfields whitening to harvest. Out of these woods and fields rose at intervals what seemed the towers and spires of cities set upon hills. We could have fancied ourselves in central Italy, surveying from some eminence like Monte Amiata the ancient towns of Tuscany and Umbria rising on their rocky heights out of chestnut woods and fields of ripening corn. But the city towers were only piles of grey rock, and over the wide horizon there was not a sign of human life—only the silence and loneliness of an untouched wilderness.

From Fort Victoria, where the war of 1893 began by a raid of the young Matabili warriors upon the Mashona tribes, who were living under the protection of the Company, it is seventeen miles to Zimbabwye. The track leads through a pretty country, with alternate stretches of wood and grass, bold hills on either side, and blue peaked mountains in the distance. Crossing a low, bare ridge of granite, one sees nearly a mile away, among thick trees, a piece of grey wall, and when one comes nearer, what seems the top of a tower just peeping over the edge of the wall. It is Zimbabwye—a wall of loose but well trimmed and neatly fitted pieces of granite surrounding an elliptical inclosure; within this inclosure other half-ruined walls over-grown by shrubs and trees, and a strange solid tower or pillar thirty feet high, built, without mortar, of similar pieces of trimmed granite.[51] This is all that there is to see. One paces to and fro within the inclosure and measures the width and length of the passages between the walls. One climbs the great inclosing wall at a point where part of it has been broken down, and walks along the broad top, picking one's way over the stems of climbing shrubs, which thrust themselves across the wall from beneath or grow rooted in its crevices. One looks and looks again, and wonders. But there is nothing to show whether this grey wall is three centuries or thirty centuries old. There is no architectural style, no decoration even, except a rudely simple pattern on the outside of the wall which faces the east; so there is nothing by which one can connect this temple, if it is a temple, with the buildings of any known race or country. In this mystery lies the charm of the spot—in this and in the remoteness and silence of a country which seems to have been always as it is to-day. One mark of modern man, and one only, is to be seen. In the middle of the valley, some three hundred yards from the great building, Mr. Cecil Rhodes has erected a monument to Major Wilson and the thirty-seven troopers who fell with him on the Lower Shangani River in December, 1893, fighting gallantly to the last against an overwhelming force of Matabili. The monument stands on an eminence surrounded by the broken wall of some ancient stronghold. It has been wisely placed far enough from the great ruin not to form an incongruous element in the view of the latter, and it was an imaginative thought to commemorate, at a spot in this new land which bears witness to a race of prehistoric conquerors, the most striking incident in the history of the latest conquest.

We climbed the rocky height, where the skilfully constructed walls of the ancient fort show that those who built Zimbabwye lived in fear of enemies. We sat beside the spring, a clear though not copious spring, which rises a little to the south of the great building from a fissure in the rock. Fountains so clear are rare in this country, and the existence of this one probably determined the site of the great building itself. It flows into a small pool, and is then lost, being too small to form a rivulet. No trace of man's hand is seen round it or on the margin of the pool, but those who worshipped in the temple of Zimbabwye doubtless worshipped this fountain also, for that is one of the oldest and most widely diffused forms of worship in the world. Restless nature will some day overthrow the walls of the temple, which she is piercing with the roots of shrubs and entwining with the shoots of climbing wild vines, and then only the fountain will be left.

From Fort Victoria to Fort Salisbury it is nearly two hundred miles, the country generally level, though studded, like parts of southern India, with isolated rocky hills, whose crags of granite or gneiss break under the sun and rain into strange and fantastic shapes. A people sufficiently advanced to erect fortifications might have made for themselves impregnable strongholds out of the tops of these kopjes. The timid Makalakas have in many places planted their huts in the midst of the huge detached masses into which the kopjes are cleft; but they have not known how to make their villages defensible, and have been content with piling up a few loose stones to close some narrow passage between the rocks, or surrounding their huts with a rough fence of thorn-bushes. We found one deserted village where upon each loose block there had been placed a rude erection of clay, covered at the top, and apparently intended for the storing of grain. Thus raised from the ground it was safer from wild beasts and from rain. All the dwelling huts but two had been burned. We entered these, and found the walls covered with the rudest possible representations of men and animals, drawn with charcoal, more coarsely than an average child of ten would draw, and far inferior in spirit to the figures which the Lapps of Norway will draw on a reindeer horn spoon, or the Red Indians of Dakota upon a calico cloak. Whether the village had perished by an accidental fire, or whether its inhabitants, relieved from that terror of the Matabili which drove them to hide amongst the rocks, had abandoned it for some spot in the plain below, there was no one to tell us. One curious trace of insecurity remained in a dry and light tree-trunk, which had been left standing against the side of a flat-topped rock some thirty feet high, with the lowest dozen feet too steep to be climbed. It had evidently served as a sort of ladder. By it the upper part of the rock might be gained, and when it had been pulled up, approach was cut off and the fugitives on the flat top might be safe, while the Matabili were plundering their stores of grain and killing their friends beneath.

All this eastern side of the country was frequently raided by the Matabili, whose home lay farther west towards Bulawayo. The Makalakas could offer no resistance, not only because they were poor fighters, but also because they were without cohesion. The clans were small and obeyed no common overlord. Most of the villages lived quite unconnected with one another, yielding obedience, often a doubtful obedience, to their own chief, but caring nothing for any other village. Among savages the ascendency of a comparatively numerous tribe which is drilled to fight, and which renders implicit obedience to its chief, is swift and complete. The Matabili when they entered this country had probably only ten or twelve thousand fighting men; but they conquered it without the slightest difficulty, for the inhabitants, though far more numerous, were divided into small communities, and did not attempt to offer any collective resistance. Then for more than half a century slaughter and pillage reigned over a tract of some ninety thousand square miles. Much of this tract, especially the eastern part, which we call Mashonaland, was well peopled by tribes who lived quietly, had plenty of cattle, tilled the soil, and continued to dig a little gold, as their forefathers had done for centuries. They were now mercilessly raided by the Matabili all the way from Lake Ngami on the west to the edge of the great plateau on the east, till large districts were depopulated and left desolate, the grown men having been all killed or chased away, the children either killed, or made slaves of, or taken as recruits into the Matabili army. Constant war and the sanguinary government of Lo Bengula reduced the number of the true Matabili, so that such recruiting became a necessity. Their successes filled the Matabili with an overweening confidence in their power. Through all South Africa they despised every native tribe, except that martial one which was ruled by Gungunhana on the eastern frontier of Mashonaland, and despised even the white men, thinking them but a handful. The indunas, who had visited London in 1891, endeavoured to warn them of the resources of the whites, and Lo Bengula himself was opposed to war. But the young braves, who, like Cetewayo's Zulus, desired to "wash their spears," overbore the reluctance of the monarch, only to perish in the war of 1893.

Towards Fort Salisbury the country rises and grows prettier as it shows signs of a more copious rainfall. New flowers appear, and the grass is greener. About twelve miles before the town is reached one crosses a considerable stream with a long, deep, clear pool among rocks, and is told of the misadventure of an English doctor who, after a hasty plunge into the pool, was drying himself on a flat stone just above the water when a crocodile suddenly raised its hideous snout, seized his leg in its jaws, and dragged him down. Fortunately his companions were close at hand and succeeded after a struggle in forcing the beast to drop its prey.

The town itself is built at the foot of a low, wooded hill, on the top of which stood the original fort, hastily constructed of loose stones in 1890, and occupied in serious earnest for defence during the Matabili war. It spreads over a wide space of ground, with houses scattered here and there, and has become, since the draining of the marshy land on the banks of a streamlet which runs through it, free from malaria and quite healthy. Though the sun heat was great in the end of October (for one is only eighteen degrees from the equator), the air was so fresh and dry that I could walk for miles in the full blaze of noon, and the nights were too cool to sit out on the stoep (the wooden verandah which one finds at the front of every South African house) without an overcoat. Just round the town the country is open and grassy, but the horizon in every direction is closed by woods. The views are far prettier than those from Bulawayo, and the position of the town makes it a better centre for the administration as well as the commerce of the Company's territories. It is only two hundred and twenty miles from the Zambesi at Tete, and only three hundred and seventy from the port of Beira. The Company did well to encourage the growth of Bulawayo immediately after the conquest of 1893, because it was necessary to explore and to establish order in the newest parts of its territory. But in the long run, and especially when the regions north of the Zambesi begin to be practically occupied, Bulawayo, standing in a corner of the country, will have to yield to the more imperial site of Fort Salisbury. The district which lies round the latter town is better watered than western Matabililand, and the soil richer both for pasture and for tillage. The rainfall for the year ending April, 1890, reached fifty-three inches, and the average is about forty.

Fort Salisbury is three years older than Bulawayo, and therefore much more advanced. It has even several churches. There is a colony of East Indians, who grow vegetables and get very high prices for them; and a considerable trade is done in supplying the needs of the mining districts to the north and west. Many gold-reefs lie out in those directions, and great hopes are entertained of their future, though at the time of my visit people were much busier in floating new companies to develop the mines than in taking steps for their actual development. Some very pretty country residences, in the style of Indian bungalows, have been built on the skirts of the wood a mile or two from the town; and street-lamps now light people to their homes along paths where four years ago lions were still encountered. The last lion recoiling in dismay from the first street lamp would be a good subject for a picture to illustrate the progress of Mashonaland.

[Footnote 46: A singular story was told me regarding the death of Lo Bengula's sister. She had enjoyed great influence with him, but when he took to wife the two daughters of Gungunhana, the great chief (of Zulu stock) who lived to the eastward beyond the Sabi River, she resented so bitterly the precedence accorded to them as to give the king constant annoyance. At last, after several warnings, he told her that if she persisted in making herself disagreeable he would have her put to death. Having consulted the prophet of the Matoppo Hills, who told her she would be killed, she cheerfully accepted this way out of the difficulty, and was accordingly sent away and strangled.]

[Footnote 47: The original inhabitants of the country, belonging to the tribes which we, following the Portuguese, call Makalanga or Makalaka, are called by the Matabili (themselves Zulus) Masweni. The name Maholi, often also applied to them, is said to mean "outsiders," i.e., non-Zulus. Though many had been drafted as boys into the Matabili regiments, and others were used as slaves, many more dwelt in the country west and north-west of Bulawayo. Mashonaland, to the east, is peopled by cognate tribes.]

[Footnote 48: A hut is usually allotted to each wife, and thus this impost falls heavily on the polygamist chief, being, in fact, a tax upon luxuries. I was told that in the Transvaal some of the richer natives were trying to escape it by putting two wives in the same hut.]

[Footnote 49: See his book, published in the end of 1896, entitled Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia. I do not gather from it how far, in his opinion, what went on was known to the higher officials.

In a Report presented to Parliament in 1897, Sir Richard Martin states that although there was no regulation allowing forced labour, force was, in fact, used to bring the natives from their kraals to work, and that the irritation thus caused did much to provoke the outbreak. The Company in a reply which they have published do not admit this. I have no data, other than the Report, for pronouncing an opinion on the responsibility of the officials; but there seems to be no doubt that, both in this and in other respects, many of the native police behaved badly, and that the experiment of employing them, which seemed to have much to recommend it, did in fact fail.]

[Footnote 50: The Shangani is here a very small stream. It was far away to the north, on the lower course of the same stream, that Major Wilson and his party perished later in the war.]

[Footnote 51: These ruins have been described in Chapter IX.]



CHAPTER XVI

FROM FORT SALISBURY TO THE SEA—MANICALAND AND THE PORTUGUESE TERRITORIES.

In Africa, moisture is everything. It makes the difference between fertility and barrenness; it makes the difference between a cheerful and a melancholy landscape. As one travels north-eastward from Palapshwye to Bulawayo, and from Bulawayo to Fort Salisbury, one passes by degrees from an arid and almost rainless land to a land of showers and flowing waters. In Bechuanaland there are, except for three months in the year, no streams at all. In Matabililand one begins to find perennial brooks. In Mashonaland there are at last rivers, sometimes with rocky banks and clear deep pools, which (like that just mentioned) tempt one to bathe and risk the terrible snap of a crocodile's jaws. Thus eastern Mashonaland is far more attractive than the countries which I have described in the last two chapters. It has beautiful and even striking scenery. The soil, where the granitic rocks do not come too near the surface, is usually fertile, and cultivation is easier than in the regions to the south-west, because the rains are more copious. There are many places round Fort Salisbury and on the way thence to Mtali and Massikessi where a man might willingly settle down to spend his days, so genial and so full of beauty is the nature around him. And as the land is high, it is also healthy. Except in a few of the valley bottoms, fever need not be feared, even after the rains.

From Fort Salisbury to the Indian Ocean at Beira it is a journey of three hundred and seventy miles, of which the first one hundred and fifty-five are in British, the rest in Portuguese, territory. Before the railway, which now (1899) runs all the way, had been completed, this distance required eight to ten days' travel. It may now be despatched in a day and a half. But those who hurry through this picturesque region behind the locomotive lose much of the charm which the journey, by far the most attractive part of a South African tour, formerly had for the lover of nature.

For the first forty miles south-eastward from Fort Salisbury the track runs through a wooded country, diversified by broad stretches of pasture. Here and there we found a European farm, marked in the distance by the waving tops of the gum-trees, with the low wooden house festooned by the brilliant mauve blossoms of the climbing bougainvillea, and the garden enclosed by hedges of grenadilla, whose fruit is much eaten in South Africa. Vegetables raised on these farms fetch enormous prices in the town, so that a man who understands the business may count on making more by this than he will do by "prospecting" for gold mines, or even by floating companies. We found the grass generally fresh and green, for some showers had fallen, and the trees, though still small, were in new leaf with exquisite tints of red. Now and then, through gaps between the nearer hills, there are glimpses of dim blue mountains. As one gets farther to the south-east the hills are higher, and on either side there rise fantastic kopjes of granite. Their tops are cleft and riven by deep fissures, and huge detached blocks are strewn about at their base, or perched like gigantic tables upon the tops of pillars of rock, poised so finely that one fancies a blast of wind might overthrow them. These "perched blocks," however, have not, like the blocs perches of Western Europe, been left by ancient glaciers or icebergs, for it seems still doubtful whether there has been a glacial period in South Africa, and neither here nor in the mountains of Basutoland could I discover traces of ancient moraines. They are due to the natural decomposition of the rock on the spot. The alternate heat of the day and cold of the night—a cold which is often great, owing to the radiation into a cloudless sky—split the masses by alternate expansion and contraction, make great flakes peel off them like the coats of an onion, and give them these singularly picturesque shapes. All this part of the country is as eminently fit for a landscape painter as Bechuanaland and the more level parts of Matabililand are unfit, seeing that here, one has foregrounds as well as backgrounds, and the colours are as rich as the forms are varied. For I must add that in this region, instead of the monotonous thorny acacias of the western regions, there is much variety in the trees; no tropical luxuriance,—the air is still too dry for that,—but many graceful outlines and a great diversity of foliage. Besides, the wood has a way of disposing itself with wonderful grace. There is none of the monotony either of pine forests, like those of Northern and Eastern Europe, or of such forests of deciduous trees as one sees in Michigan and the Alleghanies, but rather what in England we call "park-like scenery," though why nature should be supposed to do best when she imitates art, I will not attempt to inquire. There are belts of wood inclosing secluded lawns, and groups of trees dotted over a stretch of rolling meadow, pretty little bits of detail which enhance the charm of the ample sweeps of view that rise and roll to the far-off blue horizon.

Beyond Marandella's—the word sounds Italian, but is really the Anglicized form of the name of a native chief—the country becomes still more open, and solitary peaks of gneiss begin to stand up, their sides of bare, smooth, grey rock sometimes too steep to be climbed. Below and between them are broad stretches of pasture, with here and there, on the banks of the streams, pieces of land which seem eminently fit for tillage. On one such piece—it is called Lawrencedale—we found that two young Englishmen had brought some forty acres into cultivation, and admired the crops of vegetables they were raising partly by irrigation, partly in reliance on the rains. Almost anything will grow, but garden stuff pays best, because there is in and round Fort Salisbury a market clamorous for it. The great risk is that of a descent of locusts, for these pests may in a few hours strip the ground clean of all that covers it. However, our young farmers had good hopes of scaring off the swarms, and if they could do so their profits would be large and certain. A few hours more through driving showers, which made the weird landscape of scattered peaks even more solemn, brought us to the halting place on Lezapi River, a pretty spot high above the stream, where the store which supplies the neighbourhood with the necessaries of life has blossomed into a sort of hotel, with a good many sleeping huts round it. One finds these stores at intervals of about twenty or thirty miles; and they, with an occasional farm like that of Lawrencedale, represent the extremely small European population, which averages less than one to a dozen square miles, even reckoning in the missionaries that are scattered here and there.

From Lezapi I made an excursion to a curious native building lying some six miles to the east, which Mr. Selous had advised me to see. The heat of the weather made it necessary to start very early, so I was awakened while it was still dark. But when I stood ready to be off just before sunrise, the Kafir boy, a servant of the store, who was to have guided me, was not to be found. No search could discover him. He had apparently disliked the errand, perhaps had some superstitious fear of the spot he was to lead me to, and had vanished, quite unmoved by the prospect of his employer's displeasure and of the sum he was to receive. The incident was characteristic of these natives. They are curiously wayward. They are influenced by motives they cannot be induced to disclose, and the motives which most affect a European sometimes fail altogether to tell upon them. With great difficulty I succeeded in finding another native boy who promised to show me the way, and followed him off through the wood and over the pastures, unable to speak a word to him, and of course, understanding not a word of the voluble bursts of talk with which he every now and then favoured me. It was a lovely morning, the sky of a soft and creamy blue, dewdrops sparkling on the tall stalks of grass, the rays of the low sun striking between the tree-tops in the thick wood that clothed the opposite hill, while here and there faint blue smoke-wreaths rose from some Kafir hut hidden among the brushwood. We passed a large village, and just beyond it overtook three Kafirs all talking briskly, as is their wont, one of them carrying a gun and apparently going after game. A good many natives have firearms, but acts of violence seem to be extremely rare. Then passing under some rocky heights we saw, after an hour and a half's fast walking, the group of huts where the Company's native Commissioner, whom I was going to find, had fixed his station. Some Kafirs were at work on their mealie-plots, and one of them, dropping his mattock, rushed across and insisted on shaking hands with me, saying "Moragos," which is said to be a mixture of Dutch and Kafir, meaning "Good-morning, sir." The Commissioner was living alone among the natives, and declared himself quite at ease as to their behaviour. One chief dwelling near had been restive, but submitted when he was treated with firmness; and the natives generally—so he told me—seem rather to welcome the intervention of a white man to compose their disputes. They are, he added, prone to break their promises, except in one case. If an object, even of small value, has been delivered to them as a token of the engagement made, they feel bound by the engagement so long as they keep this object, and when it is formally demanded back they will restore it unharmed. The fact is curious, and throws light on some of the features of primitive legal custom in Europe.

The Commissioner took me to the two pieces of old building—one can hardly call them ruins—which I had come to see. One (called Chipadzi's) has been already mentioned (see p. 75, ante). It is a bit of ancient wall of blocks of trimmed granite, neatly set without mortar, and evidently meant to defend the most accessible side of a rocky kopje, which in some distant age had been a stronghold. It has all the appearance of having been constructed by the same race that built the walls of Dhlodhlo (see p. 71) and Zimbabwye (see p. 75) (though the work is not so neat), and is called by the natives a Zimbabwye. Behind it, in the centre of the kopje, is a rude low wall of rough stones enclosing three huts, only one of which remains roofed. Under this one is the grave of a famous chief called Makoni,—the name is rather an official than a personal one, and his personal name was Chipadzi,—the uncle of the present Makoni, who is the leading chief of this district.[52] On the grave there stands a large earthenware pot, which used to be regularly filled with native beer when, once a year, about the anniversary of this old Makoni's death, his sons and other descendants came to venerate and propitiate his ghost. Some years ago, when the white men came into the country, the ceremony was disused, and the poor ghost is now left without honour and nutriment. The pot is broken, and another pot, which stood in an adjoining hut and was used by the worshippers, has disappeared. The place, however, retains its awesome character, and a native boy who was with us would not enter it. The sight brought vividly to my mind the similar spirit-worship which went on among the Romans and which goes on to-day in China; but I could not ascertain for how many generations back an ancestral ghost receives these attentions—a point which has remained obscure in the case of Roman ghosts also.

The other curiosity is much more modern. It is a deserted native village called Tchitiketi ("the walled town"), which has been rudely fortified with three concentric lines of defence, in a way not common among the Kafirs. The huts which have now totally disappeared, stood on one side of a rocky eminence, and were surrounded by a sort of ditch ten feet deep, within which was a row of trees planted closely together, with the intervals probably originally filled by a stockade. Some of these trees do not grow wild in this part of the country, and have apparently been planted from shoots brought from the Portuguese territories. Within this outmost line there was a second row of trees and a rough stone wall, forming an inner defence. Still farther in one finds a kind of citadel, formed partly by the rocks of the kopje, partly by a wall of rough stones, ten feet high and seven to eight feet thick, plastered with mud, which holds the stones together like mortar. This wall is pierced by small apertures, which apparently served as loopholes for arrows, and there is a sort of narrow gate through it, only four and a half feet high, covered by a slab of stone. Within the citadel, several chiefs are buried in crevices of the rock, which have been walled up, and there are still visible the remains of the huts wherein, upon a wicker stand, were placed the pots that held the beer provided for their ghosts. Having ceased to be a royal residence or a fortress, the spot remains, like the Escurial, a place of royal sepulture. The natives remember the names of the dead chiefs, but little else, and cannot tell one when the fortress was built nor why it was forsaken. Everything is so rude that one must suppose the use of loopholes to have been learned from the Portuguese, who apparently came from time to time into these regions; and the rudeness confirms the theory that the buildings at the Great Zimbabwye were not the work of any of the present Bantu tribes, but of some less barbarous race.

It is not easy to find one's way alone over the country in these parts, where no Kafir speaks English or even Dutch, and where the network of native foot-paths crossing one another soon confuses recollection. However, having a distant mountain-peak to steer my course by, I succeeded in making my way back alone, and was pleased to find that, though the sun was now high in heaven and I had neither a sun-helmet nor a white umbrella, its rays did me no harm. A stranger, however, can take liberties with the sun which residents hold it safer not to take. Europeans in these countries walk as little as they can, especially in the heat of the day. They would ride, were horses attainable, but the horse-sickness makes it extremely difficult to find or to retain a good animal. All travelling for any distance is of course done in a waggon or (where one can be had) in a Cape cart.

From the Lezapi River onward the scenery grows more striking as one passes immediately beneath some of the tall towers of rock which we had previously admired from a distance. They remind one, in their generally grey hue and the extreme boldness of their lines, of some of the gneissose pinnacles of Norway, such as those above Naerodal, on the Sogne Fiord. One of them, to which the English have given the name of the Sugar Loaf, soars in a face of smooth sheer rock nearly 1000 feet above the track, the lichens that cover it showing a wealth of rich colours, greens and yellows, varied here and there by long streaks of black raindrip. Behind this summit to the north-east, eight to twelve miles away, rose a long range of sharp, jagged peaks, perfectly bare, and showing by their fine-cut lines the hardness of their rock. They were not lofty, at most 2000 feet above the level of the plateau, which is here from 4000 to 5000 feet above sea-level. But the nobility of their forms, and their clear parched sternness as they stood in the intense sunshine, made them fill and satisfy the eye beyond what one would have expected from their height. That severe and even forbidding quality which is perceptible in the aspect of the South African mountains, as it is in those of some other hot countries, seems to be due to the sense of their aridity and bareness. One feels no longing to climb them, as one would long to climb a picturesque mountain in Europe, because one knows that upon their scorching sides there is no verdure and no fountain breaks from beneath their crags. Beautiful as they are, they are repellent; they invite no familiarity; they speak of the hardness, the grimness, the silent aloofness of nature. It is only when they form the distant background of a view, and especially when the waning light of evening clothes their stern forms with tender hues, that they become elements of pure delight in the landscape.

Some fifteen miles east of this range we came upon a natural object we had given up hoping to see in South Africa, a country where the element necessary to it is so markedly deficient. This was the waterfall on the Oudzi River, one of the tributaries of the great Sabi River, which falls into the Indian Ocean. The Oudzi is not very large in the dry season, nor so full as the Garry at Killiecrankie or the stream which flows through the Yosemite Valley. But even this represents a considerable volume of water for tropical East Africa; and the rapid—it is really rather a rapid than a cascade—must be a grand sight after heavy rain, as it is a picturesque sight even in October. The stream rushes over a ridge of very hard granite rock, intersected by veins of finer-grained granite and of greenstone. It has cut for itself several deep channels in the rock, and has scooped out many hollows, not, as usually, circular, but elliptical in their shape, polished smooth, like the little pockets or basins which loose stones polish smooth as they are driven round and round by the current in the rocky bed of a Scotch torrent. The brightness of the clear green water and the softness of the surrounding woods, clothing each side of the long valley down which the eye pursues the stream till the vista is closed by distant mountains, make these falls one of the most novel and charming bits of scenery even in this romantic land. Another pleasant surprise was in store for us before we reached Mtali. We had descried from some way off a mass of brilliant crimson on a steep hillside. Coming close under, we saw it to be a wood whose trees were covered with fresh leaves. The locusts had eaten off all the first leaves three weeks before, and this was the second crop. Such a wealth of intense yet delicate reds of all hues, pink, crimson, and scarlet, sometimes passing into a flushed green, sometimes into an umber brown, I have never seen, not even in the autumn woods of North America, where, as on the mountain that overhangs Montreal, the forest is aflame with the glow of the maples. The spring, if one may give that name to the season of the first summer rains, is for South Africa the time of colours, as is the autumn in our temperate climes.

Mtali—it is often written "Umtali" to express that vague half-vowel which comes at the beginning of so many words in the Bantu languages—is a pretty little settlement in a valley whose sheltered position would make it oppressive but for the strong easterly breeze which blows nearly every day during the hot weather. There is plenty of good water in the hills all round, and the higher slopes are green with fresh grass. The town, like other towns in these regions, is constructed of corrugated iron,—for wood is scarce and dear,—with a few brick-walled houses and a fringe of native huts, while the outskirts are deformed by a thick deposit of empty tins of preserved meat and petroleum. All the roofs are of iron, and a prudent builder puts iron also into the foundation of the walls beneath the brick, in order to circumvent the white ants. These insects are one of the four plagues of South Central Africa. (The other three are locusts, horse-sickness, and fever; some add a fifth—the speculators in mining shares.) They destroy every scrap of organic matter they can reach, and will even eat their way through brick to reach wood or any other vegetable matter. Nothing but metal stops them. They work in the dark, constructing a kind of tunnel or gallery if they have to pass along an open space, as, for instance, to reach books upon a shelf. (I was taken to see the public library at Mtali, and found they had destroyed nearly half of it.) They are less than half an inch long, of a dull greyish white, the queen, or female, about three times as large as the others. Her quarters are in a sort of nest deep in the ground, and if this nest can be found and destroyed, the plague will be stayed, for a time at least. There are several other kinds of ants. The small red ant gets among one's provisions and devours the cold chicken. We spent weary hours in trying to get them out of our food-boxes, being unable to fall in with the local view that they ought to be eaten with the meat they swarm over, as a sort of relish to it. There is also the large reddish-black ant, which bites fiercely, but is regarded with favour because it kills the white ants when it can get at them. But the white ant is by far the most pernicious kind, and a real curse to the country.

At the end of 1896, when the construction of the Beira railway from Chimoyo to Fort Salisbury began to be energetically prosecuted, it was found that to take the line past Mtali would involve a detour of some miles and a heavy gradient in crossing a ridge at the Christmas Pass. Mr. Rhodes promptly determined, instead of bringing the railway to the town, to bring the town to the railway. Liberal compensation was accordingly paid to all those who had built houses at old Mtali, and new Mtali was in 1897 founded on a carefully selected site seven miles away.

In 1895 there were about one hundred Europeans in the town of Mtali, all, except the Company's officials and the storekeepers, engaged in prospecting for or beginning to work gold-mines; for this is the centre of one of the first-explored gold districts, and sanguine hopes have been entertained of its reefs. We drove out to see some of the most promising in the Penha Longa Valley, six miles to the eastward. Here three sets of galleries have been cut, and the extraction of the metal was said to be ready to begin if the machinery could be brought up from the coast. As to the value and prospects of the reefs, over which I was most courteously shown by the gentlemen directing the operations, I could of course form no opinion. They are quartz-reefs, occurring in talcose and chloritic schistose rocks, and some of them maintain their direction for many miles. There is no better place than this valley[53] for examining the ancient gold-workings, for here they are of great size. Huge masses of alluvial soil in the bottom of the valley had evidently been turned over, and indeed a few labourers were still at work upon these. But there had also been extensive open cuttings all along the principal reefs, the traces of which are visible in the deep trenches following the line of the reefs up and down the slopes of the hills, and in the masses of rubbish thrown out beside them. Some of these cuttings are evidently recent, for the sides are in places steep and even abrupt, which they would not be if during many years the rains had been washing the earth down into the trenches. Moreover, iron implements have been found at the bottom, of modern shapes and very little oxidized. Probably, therefore, while some of these workings may be of great antiquity, others are quite recent—perhaps less than a century old. Such workings occur in many places over Mashonaland and Matabililand. They are always open; that is to say, the reef was worked down from the surface, not along a tunnel—a fact which has made people think that they were carried on by natives only; and they almost always stop when water is reached, as though the miners had known nothing of pumps. Tradition has nothing to say as to the workings; but we know that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a good deal of gold was brought down to the Portuguese coast stations; and when the Mashonaland pioneers came in 1890, there were a few Portuguese trying to get the metal out of the alluvial deposits along the stream banks. The reefs, which are now being followed by level shafts or galleries driven into the sides of the hills, are (in most cases at least) the same as those which the old miners attacked from above.

North of Penha Longa lies an attractive bit of country, near a place called Inyanga, which, unfortunately, we had not time to visit. It is a sort of tableland about thirty miles long by fifteen wide, from 6000 to 7000 feet above sea-level, with the highest summits reaching 8000 feet; and in respect of its height enjoys not only a keen and bracing air, but a copious rainfall, which makes it a specially good grazing country. It will probably one day become not only the choicest ranching-ground of East Central Africa, but also a health resort from the surrounding regions. At present it is quite empty, the land having been, as I was told, bought up by several syndicates, who are holding it in hope of a rise in prices. Here are the remarkable stone-cased pits, referred to in Chapter IX.; and here there are also numerous ancient artificial watercourses for irrigating the soil, which were constructed by some race of immigrants accustomed to artificial irrigation in their own country, for it would hardly have occurred to natives to construct such works here, where the rainfall is sufficient for the needs of tillage. Still farther to the north is a less elevated region, remarkable for the traces it bears of having been at one time densely populated. Tillage was so extensive that the very hillsides were built up into terraces to be planted with crops. To-day there are hardly any inhabitants, for a good many years ago Mzila, the father of Gungunhana, chief of a fierce and powerful tribe which lives on the lower course of the Sabi River, raided all this country, and in successive invasions killed off or chased away the whole population. Such wholesale slaughter and devastation is no uncommon thing in the annals of South Africa. Tshaka, the uncle of Cetewayo, annihilated the inhabitants over immense tracts round Zululand. And in comparison with such bloodthirsty methods the Assyrian plan of deporting conquered populations from their homes to some distant land may have seemed, and indeed may have been, a substantial step in human progress. However, just when Tshaka was massacring his Kafir neighbours, the Turks were massacring the Christians of Chios, and at the time of our visit, in October, 1895, Abdul-Hamid II. was beginning his massacres in Asia Minor; so perhaps the less said about progress the better.

The track from Mtali to the sea crosses a high ridge at a point called the Christmas Pass, and descends into Portuguese territory through some very noble and varied mountain scenery.[54] It reminded us sometimes of the Italian slopes of the Eastern Alps, sometimes of the best parts of the Perthshire Highlands, though of course it was rather in the forms of hill and valley than in the trees that clothed their slopes that this resemblance lay. The first Portuguese settlement is at a place called Macequece, or Massikessi, where the pioneers of the British South Africa Company conducted in 1891 a little war on their own account with the Portuguese, whose superior forces they routed. The Portuguese claimed all this inland region on the Hinterland principle, in respect of their ownership of the coast, while the British pioneers relied on the fact that their adversaries had never established a really effective occupation. The dispute was carried by the Portuguese Mozambique Company into the English courts of law,[55] and was ultimately adjusted diplomatically by an agreement between the British and Portuguese governments, signed June 11, 1891. The delimitation of the frontiers was not fully completed in this region till 1896, but Massikessi was by the treaty of 1891 left to Portugal. After Massikessi the mountains recede, and wide plains begin to open to the east and south. As the country sinks, the temperature rises and the air grows heavier and less keen. The ground is covered with wood, and in the woods along the streams a few palms and bamboos and other tropical forms of vegetation begin to appear.[56] But we found the woods in many places stripped bare. Terrible swarms of locusts had passed, leaving a track of dismal bareness. It had been a dry year, too, and even what grass the locusts had spared was thin and withered. Thus for want of food the cattle had perished. All along the road from Mtali we saw oxen lying dead, often by some pool in a brook, to which they had staggered to drink, and where they lay down to die. We encountered few waggons, and those few were almost all standing with the team unyoked, some of their beasts dead or sickly, some, too weak to draw the load farther, obliged to stand idly where they had halted till the animals should regain strength, or fresh oxen be procured. This is what a visitation of locusts means, and this is how the progress of a country is retarded by the stoppage of the only means of transport.

We reached the terminus of the railway at Chimoyo after two days' long and fatiguing travel from Mtali, including an upset of our vehicle in descending a steep donga to the bed of a streamlet—an upset which might easily have proved serious, but gave us nothing worse than a few bruises. The custom being to start a train in the afternoon and run it through the night,—all trains were then special,—we had plenty of time to look round the place, and fortunately found a comfortable store and a most genial Scottish landlord from Banffshire. There was, however, nothing to see, not even Portuguese local colour; for though Chimoyo is well within the Portuguese frontier, the village is purely English, and was living by the transport service which then made the end of the railway its starting-point for the territories of the Company. Now that it has become merely a station, the railway being now (1899) open all the way to Fort Salisbury, it may have dwindled away. Having nothing else to do, I climbed through the sultry noon to the top of the nearest kopje, a steep granite hill which, as I was afterwards told, is a favourite "house of call" for lions. No forest monarch, however, presented himself to welcome me, and I was left to enjoy the view alone. It was striking. Guarding the western horizon rose the long chain of mountains from which we had emerged stretching in a huge arc from south-east to north, with some bold outlying peaks flung forward from the main mass, all by their sharp, stern outlines, in which similar forms were constantly repeated, showing that they were built of the same hard crystalline rocks. Beneath, the country spread out in a vast, wooded plain, green or brown, according as the wood was denser in one part and sparser in another. It was still low wood, with no sense of tropical luxuriance about it, and the ground still dry, with not a glimpse of water anywhere. Here and there out of this sea of forest rose isolated heights whose abrupt craggy tops glistened in the sunlight. To the east the plain fell slowly away to an immensely distant horizon, where lay the deadly flats that border the Indian Ocean. Except where the iron roofs of the huts at Chimoyo shone, there was not a sign of human dwelling or human labour through this great wild country, lying still and monotonous under a cloudless sky. It has been a wilderness from the beginning of the world until now, traversed, no doubt, many centuries ago by the gold-seekers whose favourite track went up from the coast past Great Zimbabwye into what is now Matabililand, traversed again occasionally in later times by Portuguese traders, but in no wise altered during these thousands of years from its original aspect. Now at last its turn has come. A new race of gold-seekers have built a railway, and along the railway, wherever there are not swamps to breed fever, the land will be taken for farms, and the woods will be cut down, and the wild beasts will slink away, and trading-posts will grow into villages, and the journey from Beira to Bulawayo will become as easy and familiar as is to-day the journey from Chicago to San Francisco, through a country which a century ago was as little known as this African wilderness.