No one who cares for natural scenery quits Cape Town without ascending

Table Mountain, whose summit affords not only a very beautiful and

extensive prospect over the surrounding country, but a striking ocean

view. Looking down the narrow gullies that descend from the top, one

sees the intensely blue sea closing them below, framed between their

jutting crags, while on the other side the busy streets and wharves of

Cape Town lie directly under the eye, and one can discover the vehicles

in the streets and the trees in the Governor's garden. The heaths and

other flowers and shrubs that grow profusely over the wide top, which is

not flat, as he who looks at it from the sea fancies, but cut up by

glens, with here and there lake reservoirs in the hollows, are very

lovely, and give a novel and peculiar charm to this ascent.[42] Nor is

the excursion to Cape Point, the real Cape of Storms of Bartholomew

Diaz, and the Cape of Good Hope of Vasco da Gama, less beautiful. An

hour in the railway brings one to Simon's Bay, the station of the

British naval squadron, a small but fairly well sheltered inlet under

high hills. From this one drives for four hours over a very rough track

through a lonely and silent country, sometimes sandy, sometimes thick

with brushwood, but everywhere decked with brilliant flowers, to the

Cape, a magnificent headland rising almost vertically from the ocean to

a height of 800 feet. Long, heavy surges are always foaming on the

rocks below and nowhere, even on this troubled coast, where the hot

Mozambique current meets a stream of cold Antarctic water, do gales more

often howl and shriek than round these rocky pinnacles. One can well

understand the terror with which the Portuguese sailors five centuries

ago used to see the grim headland loom up through the clouds driven by

the strong south-easters, that kept them struggling for days or weeks to

round the cape that marked their way to India. But Sir Francis Drake,

who passed it coming home westward from his ever-famous voyage round the

world, had a more auspicious experience: "We ran hard aboard the Cape,

finding the report of the Portuguese to be most false, who affirm that

it is the most dangerous cape of the world, never without intolerable

storms and present danger to travellers who come near the same. This

cape is a most stately thing, and the finest cape we saw in the whole

circumference of the earth."

A third excursion, which well repays the traveller, is to the quaint

little town of Stellenbosch, founded by Adrian van der Stel (Governor of

the Colony) in 1680, and called after himself and his wife, whose name

was Bosch. It is built in genuine Dutch style, with straight streets of

two-storied white houses, the windows nearly flush with the walls as in

Holland, the wood-work and the green shutters those of Holland, and long

lines of dark-green oaks shading the foot-walks on each side the street.

Soft, rich pastures all round--for there is plenty of water brought down

from the hills--complete the resemblance to a Hobbema landscape; and it

is only when one looks up and sees rocky mountains soaring behind into

the sky that the illusion is broken. It is here, and in the town of

Swellendam, farther east, and in some of the villages that lie northward

of Stellenbosch in the western province, that the Dutch element has

remained strongest and has best retained its ancient ways and customs.

We have, however, delayed long enough round the capital, and it is time

to plunge into the interior by the railway. Sixty miles to the north of

Cape Town, the trunk-line, which has threaded its way through the

valleys of an outlying range of mountains, reaches the foot of the great

inner table-land at a place called Hex River, and in an hour climbs by

zigzags up an incline which is in some places as steep as one in

thirty-five, mounting 1600 feet into a desert land. Rugged brown

mountains, sometimes craggy, sometimes covered with masses of loose

stone, rise above the lower ground, now a valley, now an open plain,

through which the railway takes its eastward way. The bushes, which had

been tall and covered with blossoms on the ascent, are now stunted,

bearing small and usually withered flowers. Hardly an herb, and not a

blade of grass, is to be seen on the ground, which is sometimes of clay,

baked hard by the sun, sometimes of sand, without a drop of water

anywhere. Yet water flows when, now and then in the summer, a storm

breaks, or a few showers come; and then nature revives, and for a week

or two flowers spring from the soil and a fresher green comes upon the

bushes. In a landscape so arid one hears with surprise that the land is

worth ten shillings an acre for one or two of the smallest shrubs give

feed for sheep, and there are wells scattered about sufficient for the

flocks. The farms are large, usually of at least six thousand acres, so

one seldom sees a farmhouse. The farmers are all of Boer stock. They

lead a lonely life in a silent and melancholy nature, but their habitual

gravity has not made them unsocial, for they are fond of riding or

driving in their waggons to visit one another on all occasions of

festivity or mourning. Every ten or fifteen miles there is a station,

and here the British element in the population appears, chiefly occupied

in store-keeping. At Matjesfontein one finds an hotel and a number of

small villas built to serve as a health resort. Wells surrounded by

Australian gums planted for shade, make a little oasis in the desert.

Farther east the village of Beaufort West, the only place along the line

that aspires to be called a town, boasts a church with a spire, and has

one or two streets, though most of its houses are stuck down irregularly

over a surface covered with broken bottles and empty sardine and

preserved meat tins. Here, too, there is a large, shallow pond of water,

and here people with weak lungs come to breathe the keen, dry,

invigorating air. Of its efficacy there is no doubt, but one would think

that the want of society and of variety would be almost as depressing as

the air is stimulating. The prospects have a certain beauty, for beyond

the wide, bare, greyish-brown plain to the south sharp mountains stand

up, which take at sunrise and sunset delightful tints of blue and

purple, and the sense of a vast expanse on earth beneath and in heaven

above has something strange and solemn. But the monotony of perpetual

sunlight upon a landscape which has no foregrounds and never changes,

save in colour, must be trying to those who have no occupation except

that of getting well.

This Karroo scenery continues, with little variation, for hundreds of

miles. To the north of the railway, which runs mostly from west to east,

the aspect of the country is much the same, dry, stony, and forbidding,

for full three hundred miles to the Orange River, and beyond that into

Namaqualand. Except for the few houses at some of the stations, it seems

a wilderness; yet here and there stand tiny villages, connected by lines

of coach with the railway, whither the neighbouring farmers come to

supply their household needs. But as the train moves farther and farther

eastward the features of nature grow less austere. The mountains by

degrees recede or sink; the country becomes more of an open plain,

though with isolated hills visible here and there over its expanse. It

is also slightly greener, and after the rains some little grass springs

up, besides the low, succulent shrub which the sheep eat. At De Aar

Junction, five hundred miles from Cape Town, the line to Bloemfontein

and the Transvaal branches off to the right. We follow the western

branch over a vast slightly undulating plain to the Orange River, here a

perennial stream, and at six hundred and forty-six miles from Cape Town

find ourselves once more in the haunts of men at Kimberley.

Kimberley, the city of diamonds, has had a curious history. In 1869-70

the precious crystals, first found in 1867 near the Orange River, were

discovered here in considerable quantity. A sudden rush of adventurers

from all parts of South Africa, as well as from Europe, gave it in three

or four years a population of many thousands. The mining claims were

then and for some years afterwards in the hands of a large number of

persons and companies who had opened them or purchased them. The

competition of these independent miner-workers was bringing down the

price of the stones, and the waste or leakage arising from the theft of

stones by the native work-people, who sold them to European I.D.B.

(illicit diamond-buyers), seriously reduced the profits of mining. It

was soon seen that the consolidation of the various concerns would

effect enormous savings and form the only means of keeping up the price

of diamonds. The process of amalgamating the claims and interests and

merging them in one huge corporation was completed in 1885, chiefly by

the skill and boldness of Mr. Cecil J. Rhodes, who had gone to Natal for

his health shortly before 1870, and came up to Kimberley in the first

months of the rush. Since the amalgamation, the great corporation called

the De Beers Consolidated Mining Company (which now owns nearly all the

mines), has reduced the output of diamonds to just such an annual amount

as experience has proved that Europe and America--the United States is

the chief market--are able to take at a price high enough to leave a

large profit. By this means the price has been well maintained. This

policy, however, has incidentally reduced the population of Kimberley.

One powerful corporation, with its comparatively small staff of

employees, has taken the place of the crowd of independent adventurers

of the old days, and some of the mines have been closed because the rest

are sufficient to produce as many diamonds as it is deemed prudent to

put upon the market. Thus there are now only about 10,000 people in the

town, and some of the poorer quarters are almost deserted, the stores

and taverns, as well as the shanty dwellings, empty and falling to

pieces. In the better quarters, however, the old roughness has been

replaced by order and comfort. Many of the best villas are embowered in

groves of tall Australian gum-trees, while the streets and roads are

bordered either by gum-trees or by hedges of prickly-pear or agave. The

streets are wide, and most of the houses are detached and of one story,

built like Indian bungalows; so the town covers an area quite

disproportionate to its population, and gives the impression of an

extensive city. For the residence of the Europeans employed in the two

great mines which the Company works, a suburb called Kenilworth has been

built by Mr. Rhodes, where neat houses of four, five, or six rooms each

stand in handsome avenues planted with Australian trees, the so-called

"beefwood" and the red gum. They are not beautiful trees, but they have

the merit of growing very fast, and any shade is welcome.

The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two: a yellow

and softish clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard blue clay,

lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin layer of

calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud-pits due to

volcanic action, such as the so-called mud-volcanoes of Iceland, near

Namaskard, on the banks of Lake Myvatn, or such as the similar boiling

mud-pits of the Yellowstone Park country, called from their brilliant

colours the "Paint-pots." It is, at any rate, from circular clay basins,

inclosed within a harder rock (basalt, black shale, and quartzite) that

the stones are obtained. Some of the mines are worked even to a depth of

1200 feet by shafts and subterranean galleries. Some are open, and

these, particularly that called the Wesselton Mine, are an interesting

sight. This deep hollow, one-third of a mile in circumference and 100

feet deep, inclosed by a strong fence of barbed wire, is filled by a

swarm of active Kafir workmen, cleaving the "hard blue" with pickaxes,

piling it up on barrows, and carrying it off to the wide fields; where

it is left exposed to the sun, and, during three months, to the rain.

Having been thus subjected to a natural decomposition, it is the more

readily brought by the pickaxe into smaller fragments before being sent

to the mills, where it is crushed, pulverized, and finally washed to get

at the stones. Nowhere in the world does the hidden wealth of the soil

and the element of chance in its discovery strike one so forcibly as

here, where you are shown a piece of ground a few acres in extent, and

are told, "Out of this pit diamonds of the value of L12,000,000 have

been taken." Twenty-six years ago the ground might have been bought for

L50.

The most striking sight at Kimberley, and one unique in the world, is

furnished by the two so-called "compounds" in which the natives who work

in the mines are housed and confined. They are huge inclosures,

unroofed, but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything from being

thrown out of them over the walls, and with a subterranean entrance to

the adjoining mine. The mine is worked on the system of three eight-hour

shifts, so that the workman is never more than eight hours together

underground. Round the interior of the wall there are built sheds or

huts, in which the natives live and sleep when not working. A hospital

is also provided within the inclosure, as well as a school where the

work-people can spend their leisure in learning to read and write. No

spirits are sold--an example of removing temptation from the native

which it is to be wished that the legislature of Cape Colony would

follow. Every entrance is strictly guarded, and no visitors, white or

native, are permitted, all supplies being obtained from the store

within, kept by the Company. The De Beers mine compound contained at the

time of my visit 2600 natives, belonging to a great variety of tribes,

so that here one could see specimens of the different native types, from

Natal and Pondoland on the south, to the shores of Lake Tanganyika in

the far north. They come from every quarter, attracted by the high

wages, usually eighteen to thirty shillings a week, and remain for three

months or more and occasionally even for long periods, knowing, of

course, that they have to submit to the precautions which are absolutely

needed to prevent them from appropriating the diamonds they may happen

to find in the course of their work. To encourage honesty, ten per cent,

of the value of any stone which a workman may find is given to him if he

brings it himself to the overseer, and the value of the stones on which

this ten per cent, is paid is estimated at L400,000 in each year.

Nevertheless, a certain number of thefts occur. I heard from a

missionary an anecdote of a Basuto who, after his return from Kimberley,

was describing how, on one occasion, his eye fell on a valuable diamond

in the clay he was breaking into fragments. While he was endeavouring to

pick it up he perceived the overseer approaching, and, having it by this

time in his hand, was for a moment terribly frightened, the punishment

for theft being very severe. The overseer, however, passed on. "And

then," said the Basuto, "I knew that there was indeed a God, for He had

preserved me."

When the native has earned the sum he wants--and his earnings accumulate

quickly, since he can live upon very little--he takes his wages in

English sovereigns, a coin now current through all Africa as far as

Tanganyika, goes home to his own tribe, perhaps a month's or six weeks'

journey distant, buys two oxen, buys with them a wife, and lives

happily, or at least lazily, ever after. Here in the vast oblong

compound one sees Zulus from Natal, Fingos, Pondos, Tembus, Basutos,

Bechuanas, Gungunhana's subjects from the Portuguese territories, some

few Matabili and Makalaka, and plenty of Zambesi boys from the tribes on

both sides of that great river--a living ethnological collection such as

can be examined nowhere else in South Africa. Even Bushmen, or at least

natives with some Bushman blood in them, are not wanting. They live

peaceably together, and amuse themselves in their several ways during

their leisure hours. Besides games of chance we saw a game resembling

"fox and geese," played with pebbles on a board; and music was being

discoursed on two rude native instruments, the so-called "Kafir piano,"

made of pieces of iron of unequal length fastened side by side in a

frame, and a still ruder contrivance of hard bits of wood, also of

unequal size, which when struck by a stick emit different notes, the

first beginnings of a tune. A very few were reading or writing letters,

the rest busy with their cooking or talking to one another. Some tribes

are incessant talkers, and in this strange mixing-pot of black men one

may hear a dozen languages spoken as one passes from group to group.

The climate of Kimberley is healthy, and even bracing, though not

pleasant when a north-west wind from the Kalahari Desert fills the air

with sand and dust. Its dryness recommends it as a resort for

consumptive patients, while the existence of a cultivated, though small,

society, makes it a less doleful place of residence than are the

sanatoria of the Karroo. The country round is, however, far from

attractive. Save on the east, where there rises a line of hills just

high enough to catch the lovely lights of evening and give colour and

variety to the landscape, the prospect is monotonous in every direction.

Like the ocean, this vast plain is so flat that you cannot see how vast

it is. Except in the environs of the town, it is unbroken by tree or

house, and in a part of those environs the masses of bluish-grey mine

refuse that strew the ground give a dismal and even squalid air to the

foreground of the view. One is reminded of the deserted coal-pits that

surround Wigan, or the burnt-out and waste parts of the Black Country in

South Staffordshire, though at Kimberley there is, happily, no

coal-smoke or sulphurous fumes in the air, no cinder on the surface, no

coal-dust to thicken the mud and blacken the roads. Some squalor one

must have with that disturbance of nature which mining involves, but

here the enlightened activity of the Company and the settlers has done

its best to mitigate these evils by the planting of trees and orchards,

by the taste which many of the private houses show, and by the provision

here and there of open spaces for games.

From Kimberley the newly-opened railway runs one hundred and fifty miles

farther north to Vryburg, till lately the capital of the Crown Colony of

British Bechuanaland, annexed in 1895 to Cape Colony, and thence to

Mafeking. After a few miles the line crosses the Vaal River, here a

respectable stream for South Africa, since it has, even in the dry

season, more water than the Cam at Cambridge, or the Cherwell at

Oxford--perhaps as much as the Arno at Florence. It flows in a wide,

rocky bed, about thirty feet below the level of the adjoining country.

The country becomes more undulating as the line approaches the

frontiers, first of the Orange Free State, and then of the Transvaal

Republic, which bounds that State on the north. Bushes are seen, and

presently trees, nearly all prickly mimosas, small and unattractive, but

a pleasant relief from the bare flats of Kimberley, whence all the wood

that formerly grew there has been taken for mine props and for fuel.

There is more grass, too, and presently patches of cultivated land

appear, where Kafirs grow maize, called in South Africa "mealies." Near

the village of Taungs[43] a large native reservation is passed, where

part of the Batlapin tribe is settled, and here a good deal of ground is

tilled, though in September, when no crop is visible, one scarcely

notices the fields, since they are entirely unenclosed, mere strips on

the veldt, a little browner than the rest, and with fewer shrublets on

them. But the landscape remains equally featureless and monotonous,

redeemed only, as evening falls, by the tints of purple and violet which

glow upon the low ridges or swells of ground that rise in the distance.

Vryburg is a cheerful little place of brick walls and corrugated-iron

roofs; Mafeking another such, still smaller and, being newer, with a

still larger proportion of shanties to houses. At Mafeking the railway

ended in 1895. It has since been opened all the way to Bulawayo. Here

ends also the territory of Cape Colony, the rest of Bechuanaland to the

north and west forming the so-called Bechuanaland Protectorate, which in

October, 1895, was handed over by the Colonial Office, subject to

certain restrictions and provisions for the benefit of the natives, to

the British South Africa Company, within the sphere of whose operations

it had, by the charter of 1890, been included. After the invasion of the

Transvaal Republic by the expedition led by Dr. Jameson, which started

from Pitsani, a few miles north of Mafeking, in December, 1895, this

transfer was recalled, and Bechuanaland is now again under the direct

control of the High Commissioner for South Africa as representing the

British Crown. It is administered by magistrates, who have a force of

police at their command, and by native chiefs, the most powerful and

famous of whom is Khama.

Close to Mafeking itself there was living a chieftain whose long career

is interwoven with many of the wars and raids that went on between the

Boers and the natives from 1840 to 1885--Montsioa (pronounced

"Montsiwa"), the head of a tribe of Barolongs. We were taken to see him,

and found him sitting on a low chair under a tree in the midst of his

huge native village, dressed in a red flannel shirt, a pair of corduroy

trousers, and a broad grey felt hat with a jackal's tail stuck in it for

ornament. His short woolly hair was white, and his chocolate-coloured

skin, hard and tough like that of a rhinoceros, was covered with a

fretwork of tiny wrinkles, such as one seldom sees on a European face.

He was proud of his great age (eighty-five), and recalled the names of

several British governors and generals during the last seventy years.

But his chief interest was in inquiries (through his interpreter)

regarding the Queen and events in England, and he amused his visitors by

the diplomatic shrewdness with which, on being told that there had been

a change of government in England, and a majority in favour of the new

government, he observed "They have made a mistake; they could not have

had a better government than the old one." He was a wealthy man, owning

an immense number of the oxen which then carried on (for the cattle

plague soon after destroyed most of them) the transport service between

Mafeking and Bulawayo; and, from all I could learn, he ruled his people

well, following the counsels of the British government, which in 1885

delivered him out of the hands of the Boers. He died in the middle of

1896.

At Mafeking we bade farewell to the railway, and prepared to plunge into

the wilderness. We travelled in a light American waggon, having a Cape

Dutchman as driver and a coloured "Cape boy" to help him, but no other

attendants. The waggon had a small iron tank, which we filled with water

that had been boiled to kill noxious germs, and with this we made our

soup and tea. For provisions we carried biscuits, a little tinned soup

and meat, and a few bottles of soda-water. These last proved to be the

most useful part of our stores, for we found the stream-or well-water

along the route undrinkable, and our mouths were often so parched that

it was only by the help of sips of soda-water that we could manage to

swallow the dry food. At the European stores which occur along the road,

usually at intervals of thirty or forty miles, though sometimes there is

none for sixty miles or more, we could often procure eggs and sometimes

a lean chicken; so there was enough to support life, though seldom did

we get what is called in America "a square meal."

Northward from Mafeking the country grows pretty. At first there are

trees scattered picturesquely over the undulating pastures and sometimes

forming woods--dry and open woods, yet welcome after the bareness which

one has left behind. Here we passed the tiny group of houses called

Pitsani, little dreaming that three months later it would become famous

as the place where the Matabililand police were marshalled, and from

which they started on their ill-starred march into the Transvaal, whose

bare and forbidding hills we saw a few miles away to the east. Presently

the ground becomes rougher, and the track winds among and under a

succession of abrupt kopjes (pronounced "koppies"), mostly of granitic

or gneissose rock. One is surprised that a heavy coach, and still

heavier waggons, can so easily traverse such a country, for the road is

only a track, for which art has done nothing save in cutting a way

through the trees. It is one of the curious features of South Africa

that the rocky hills have an unusual faculty for standing detached

enough from one another to allow wheeled vehicles to pass between them,

and the country is so dry that morasses, the obstacle which a driver

chiefly fears in most countries, are here, for three-fourths of the

year, not feared at all. This region of bold, craggy hills, sparsely

wooded, usually rising only some few hundred feet out of the plateau

itself, which is about 4000 feet above the sea, continues for about

thirty miles. To it there succeeds a long stretch of flat land along the

banks of the sluggish Notwani, the only perennial river of these parts;

for the stream which on the map bears the name of Molopo, and runs away

west into the desert to lose nearly all of its water in the sands, is in

September dry, and one crosses its channel without noticing it. This

Notwani, whose course is marked by a line of trees taller and greener

than the rest, is at this season no better than a feeble brook, flowing

slowly, with more mud than water. But it contains not only good-sized

fish, the catching of which is the chief holiday diversion of these

parts, but also crocodiles, which, generally dormant during the season

of low water, are apt to obtrude themselves when they are least

expected, and would make bathing dangerous, were there any temptation to

bathe in such a thick green fluid. That men as well as cattle should

drink it seems surprising, yet they do,--Europeans as well as

natives,--and apparently with no bad effects. Below Palla, one hundred

and ninety-five miles north of Mafeking, the Notwani joins the Limpopo,

or Crocodile River, a much larger stream, which has come down from the

Transvaal hills, and winds for nearly a thousand miles to the north and

east before it falls into the Indian Ocean. It is here nearly as wide as

the Thames at Henley, fordable in some places, and flowing very gently.

The country all along this part of the road is perfectly flat, and just

after the wet season very feverish, but it may be traversed with

impunity from the end of May till December. It is a dull

region--everywhere the same thin wood, through which one can see for

about a quarter of a mile in every direction, consisting of two or three

kinds of mimosa, all thorny, and all so spare and starved in their

leafage that one gets little shade beneath them when at the midday halt

shelter has to be sought from the formidable sun. On the parched ground

there is an undergrowth of prickly shrubs, among which it is necessary

to move with as much care as is needed in climbing a barbed-wire fence.

When at night, camping out on the veldt, one gathers brushwood to light

the cooking-fire, both the clothes and the hands of the novice come

badly off. Huge ant-hills begin to appear, sometimes fifteen to twenty

feet high and as many yards in circumference; but these large ones are

all dead and may be of considerable age. In some places they are so high

and steep, and stand so close together, that by joining them with an

earthen rampart a strong fort might be made. When people begin to till

the ground more largely than the natives now do, the soil heaped up in

these great mounds will be found most serviceable. It consists of good

mould, very friable, and when spread out over the service ought to prove

fertile. In pulverizing the soil, the ants render here much the same

kind of service which the earthworms do in Europe. There are no flowers

at this season (end of September), and very little grass; yet men say

that there is no better ranching country in all South Africa, and the

oxen which one meets all the way, feeding round the spots where the

transport-waggons have halted, evidently manage to pick up enough

herbage to support them. The number of ox-waggons is surprising in so

lonely a country, till one remembers that most of the food and drink, as

well as of the furniture, agricultural and mining tools, and wood for

building,--indeed, most of the necessaries and all the luxuries of life

needed in Matabililand,--have to be sent up along this road, which is

more used than the alternative route through the Transvaal from Pretoria

_via_ Pietersburg. No wonder all sorts of articles are costly in

Bulawayo, when it has taken eight or ten weeks to bring them from the

nearest railway terminus. The waggons do most of their journeying by

night, allowing the oxen to rest during the heat of the day. One of the

minor troubles of travel is the delay which ensues when one's vehicle

meets a string of waggons, sometimes nearly a quarter of a mile long,

for each has eight, nine, or even ten, span of oxen. They move very

slowly, and at night, when the track happens to be a narrow one among

trees, it is not easy to get past. Except for these waggons the road is

lonely. One sees few natives, though the narrow footpaths crossing the

wheel-track show that the country is inhabited. Here and there one

passes a large native village, such as Ramoutsie and Machudi, but small

hamlets are rare, and solitary huts still rarer. The country is of

course very thinly peopled in proportion to its resources, for, what

with the good pasture nearly everywhere and the fertile land in many

places, it could support eight or ten times the number of Barolongs,

Bamangwato, and other Bechuanas who now live scattered over its vast

area. It is not the beasts of prey that are to blame for this, for, with

the disappearance of game, lions have become extremely scarce, and

leopards and lynxes are no longer common. Few quadrupeds are seen, and

not many kinds of birds. Vultures, hawks, and a species something like a

magpie, with four pretty white patches upon the wings and a long tail,

are the commonest, together with bluish-grey guinea-fowl, pigeons and

sometimes a small partridge. In some parts there are plenty of bustards,

prized as dainties, but we saw very few. Away from the track some buck

of the commoner kinds may still be found, and farther to the west there

is still plenty of big game in the Kalahari Desert. But the region which

we traversed is almost as unattractive to the sportsman as it is to the

lover of beauty. It is, indeed, one of the dullest parts of South

Africa.

The next stage in the journey is marked by Palapshwye, Khama's capital.

This is the largest native town south of the Zambesi, for it has a

population estimated at over 20,000. It came into being only a few years

ago, when Khama, having returned from the exile to which his father had

consigned him on account of his steadfast adherence to Christianity, and

having succeeded to the chieftainship of the Bamangwato, moved the tribe

from its previous dwelling-place at Shoshong, some seventy miles to the

south-west, and fixed it here. Such migrations and foundations of new

towns are not uncommon in South Africa, as they were not uncommon in

India in the days of the Pathan and Mogul sovereigns, when each new

occupant of the throne generally chose a new residence to fortify or

adorn. Why this particular site was chosen I do not know. It stands

high, and is free from malaria, and there are springs of water in the

craggy hill behind; but the country all round is poor, rocky in some

places, sandy in others, and less attractive than some other parts of

Bechuanaland. We entered the town late at night, delayed by the deep

sand on the track, and wandered about in the dark for a long while

before, after knocking at one hut after another, we could persuade any

native to come out and show us the way to the little cluster of European

dwellings. The Kafirs are terribly afraid of the night, and fear the

ghosts, which are to them the powers of darkness, more than they care

for offers of money.

Khama was absent in England, pressing upon the Colonial Office his

objections to the demand made by the British South Africa Company that

his kingdom should be brought within the scope of their administration

and a railway constructed through it from Mafeking to Bulawayo. Besides

the natural wish of a monarch to retain his authority undiminished, he

was moved by the desire to keep his subjects from the use of

intoxicating spirits, a practice which the establishment of white men

among them would make it difficult, if not impossible, to prevent. The

main object of Khama's life and rule has been to keep his people from

intoxicants. His feelings were expressed in a letter to a British

Commissioner, in which he said: "I fear Lo Bengula less than I fear

brandy. I fought against Lo Bengula and drove him back. He never gives

me a sleepless night. But to fight against drink is to fight against

demons and not men. I fear the white man's drink more than the assagais

of the Matabili, which kill men's bodies. Drink puts devils into men and

destroys their souls and bodies." Though a Christian himself, and giving

the missionaries in his dominions every facility for their work, he has

never attempted to make converts by force. A prohibition of the use of

alcohol, however, has seemed to him to lie "within the sphere of

governmental action," and he has, indeed, imperilled his throne by

efforts to prevent the Bamangwato from making and drinking the stronger

kind of Kafir beer, to which, like all natives, they were much

addicted.[44] This beer is made from the so-called "Kafir-corn" (a grain

resembling millet, commonly cultivated by the natives), and, though less

strong than European-made spirits, is more intoxicating than German or

even English ale. Khama's prohibition of it had, shortly before my

visit, led to a revolt and threatened secession of a part of the tribe

under his younger brother, Radiclani, and the royal reformer, (himself a

strict total abstainer), had been compelled to give way, lamenting, in a

pathetic speech, that his subjects would not suffer him to do what was

best for them. Just about the same time, in England, the proposal of a

measure to check the use of intoxicating liquors led to the overthrow of

a great party and clouded the prospects of any temperance legislation.

Alike in Britain and in Bechuanaland it is no light matter to interfere

with a people's favourite indulgences. European spirits are, however, so

much more deleterious than Kafir beer that Khama still fought hard

against their introduction. The British South Africa Company forbids the

sale of intoxicants to natives in its territory, but Khama naturally

felt that when at railway stations and stores spirits were being freely

consumed by whites, the difficulty of keeping them from natives would be

largely increased. The Colonial Office gave leave for the construction

of the railway, and brought Khama into closer relations with the

Company, while securing to him a large reserve and establishing certain

provisions for his benefit and that of his people. However, a few months

later (in the beginning of 1896) the extension of the Company's powers

as to Bechuanaland was recalled, and Khama is now under the direct

protection of the Imperial Government.

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.