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Not only has Khama himself established his reputation for honesty, but he is supposed to have inoculated all his people with the same virtue. No one is supposed to steal in Khama's country. He regulates the price of the goat you buy; and the milk vendor dare not ask more than the regulation price, nor can you get it for less. One evening, on our journey from Shoshong to Palapwe, we passed a loaded waggon by the roadside with no one to guard it save a dog; and surely, we thought, such confidence as this implies a security for property rare enough in South Africa.

The aspect of Palapwe is very pleasant. Fine timber covers the hill slopes. A large grassy square, shaded by trees, and with a stream running through it, has been devoted to the outspanning of the many waggons which pass through here. There are as yet but few of those detestable corrugated-iron houses, for the Europeans have wisely elected to dwell in daub huts, like the natives. Scattered far and wide are the clusters of huts in their own enclosures, governed by their respective indunas.

High up on the hillside Khama has allotted the choicest spot of all to his spiritual and political adviser, Mr. Hepburn, the missionary. From here a lovely view extends over mountain and plain, over granite kopje and the meandering river-bed, far away into the blue distance and the Kalahari. Behind the mission house is a deep ravine, thick set with tropical vegetation, through which a stream runs, called Fotofoto, which at the head of the gorge leaps over steep rocks, and forms a lovely cascade of well-nigh a hundred feet; behind the ravine, on the rocky heights, baboons and other wild animals still linger, perturbed in mind, no doubt, at this recent occupation of their paradise.

Everything in Khama's town is conducted with the rigour--one might almost say bigotry--of religious enthusiasm. The chief conducts in person native services, twice every Sunday, in his large round kotla, at which he expects a large attendance. He stands beneath the traditional tree of justice, and the canopy of heaven, quite in a patriarchal style. He has a system of espionage by which he learns the names of those who do not keep Sunday properly, and he punishes them accordingly. He has already collected 3,000l. for a church which is to be built at Palapwe.

The two acts, however, which more than anything else display the power of the man, and perhaps his intolerance, are these. Firstly, he forbids all his subjects to make or drink beer. Any one who knows the love of a Kaffir for his porridge-like beer, and his occasional orgies, will realise what a power one man must have to stop this in a whole tribe. Even the missionaries have remonstrated with him on this point, representing the measure as too strong; but he replies, 'Beer is the source of all quarrels and disputes. I will stop it.' Secondly, he has put a stop altogether to the existence of witch doctors and their craft throughout all the Ba-mangwato--another instance of his force of will, when one considers that the national religion of the Sechuana is merely a belief in the existence of good and bad spirits which haunt them and act on their lives. All members of other neighbouring tribes are uncomfortable if they are not charmed by their witch doctor every two or three days.

Like the other Bechuana tribes, the Ba-mangwato have a totem which they once revered. Theirs is the duyker, a sort of roebuck; and Khama's father, old Sikkome, would not so much as step on a duyker-skin. Khama will now publicly eat a steak of that animal to encourage his men to shake off their belief. In manner the chief is essentially a gentleman, courteous and dignified. He rides a good deal, and prides himself on his stud. On one occasion he did what I doubt if every English gentleman would do. He sold a horse for a high price, which died a few days afterwards, whereupon Khama returned the purchase money, considering that the illness had been acquired previous to the purchase taking place. On his waggons he has painted in English, 'Khama, Chief of the Ba-mangwato.' They say he understands a great deal of our tongue, but he never trusts himself to speak it, always using an interpreter.

An instance of Khama's system of discipline came under our notice during our stay at Palapwe. Attracted by the sound of bugles, I repaired very early one morning to the kotla, and there saw men in all sorts of quaint dresses, with arms, and spades, and picks, mustering to the number of about 200. On enquiry, I was told that it was a regiment which had misbehaved and displeased the chief in some way. The punishment he inflicted on them was this: that for a given period they were to assemble every day and go and work in the fields, opening out new land for the people. There is something Teutonic in Khama's imperial discipline, but the Bechuana are made of different stuff to the Germans. They are by nature peaceful and mild, a race with strong pastoral habits, who have lived for years in dread of Matabele raids; consequently their respect for a chief like Khama--who has actually on one occasion repulsed the foe, and who has established peace, prosperity, and justice in all his borders--is unbounded, and his word is law.

Khama pervades everything in his town. He is always on horseback, visiting the fields, the stores, and the outlying kraals. He has a word for every one; he calls every woman 'my daughter,' and every man 'my son;' he pats the little children on the head. He is a veritable father of his people, a curious and unaccountable outcrop of mental power and integrity amongst a degraded and powerless race. His early history and struggles with his father and brothers are thrilling in the extreme, and his later development extraordinary. Perhaps he may be said to be the only negro living whose biography would repay the writing.

The blending of two sets of ideas, the advance of the new and the remains of the old, are curiously conspicuous at Palapwe, and perhaps the women illustrate this better than the men. On your evening walk you may meet the leading black ladies of the place, parasol in hand, with hideous dresses of gaudy cottons, hats with flowers and feathers, and displaying as they walk the airs and graces of self-consciousness. A little further on you meet the women of the lower orders returning from the fields, with baskets on their heads filled with green pumpkins, bright yellow mealy pods, and rods of sugar cane. A skin caross is thrown over their shoulders, and the rest of their mahogany-coloured bodies is nude, save for a leopard-skin loin-cloth, and armlets and necklaces of bright blue beads. Why is it that civilisation is permitted to destroy all that is picturesque? Surely we, of the nineteenth century, have much to answer for in this respect, and the missionaries who teach races, accustomed to nudity by heredity, that it is a good and proper thing to wear clothes are responsible for three evils--firstly, the appearance of lung diseases amongst them; secondly, the spread of vermin amongst them; and thirdly, the disappearance from amongst them of inherent and natural modesty.

It had been arranged that on our departure from Palapwe we should take twenty-five of Khama's men to act as excavators at the ruins of Zimbabwe. One morning, at sunrise, when we were just rising from our waggons, and indulging in our matutinal yawns, Khama's arrival was announced. The chief walked in front, dignified and smart, dressed in well-made boots, trousers with a correct seam down each side, an irreproachable coat, a billycock hat, and gloves. If Khama has a vice it is that of dress, and, curiously enough, this vice has developed more markedly in his son and heir, who is to all intents and purposes a black masher and nothing else. Khama is a neatly-made, active man of sixty, who might easily pass for twenty years younger; his face sparkles with intelligence; he is, moreover, shrewd, and looks carefully after the interests of his people, who in days scarcely yet gone by have been wretchedly cheated by unscrupulous traders. Behind him, in a long line, walked the twenty-five men that he proposed to place at our disposal, strangely enough dressed in what might be termed the 'transition style.' Ostrich feathers adorned all their hats. One wore a short cutaway coat, which came down to the small of his back, and nothing else. Another considered himself sufficiently garbed with a waistcoat and a fly whisk. They formed a curious collection of humanity, and all twenty-five sat down in a row at a respectful distance, whilst we parleyed with the chief. Luckily for us our negotiations fell through owing to the difficulties of transport; and, on inspection, I must say I felt doubtful as to their capabilities. Away from the influence of their chief, and in a strange country, I feel sure they would have given us endless trouble.

We left Khama and his town with regret on our journey northwards. A few miles below Palapwe we crossed the Lotsani River, a series of semi-stagnant pools, even after the rainy season, many of which pools were gay just then with the lotus or blue water lily . The water percolates through the sand, which has almost silted it up, and a little further on we came across what they call a 'sand river.' Not a trace of water is to be seen in the sandy bed, but, on digging down a few feet, you come across it.

The future colonisation and development of this part of Bechuanaland is dependent on the question of water, pure and simple. If artesian wells can be sunk, if water can be stored in reservoirs, something may be done; but, at present, even the few inhabitants of Khama's country are continually plunged in misery from drought.

North of Palapwe we met but few inhabitants, and, after passing the camp of the Bechuanaland Border Police at Macloutsie, we entered what is known as the 'debatable country,' between the territories of Khama and Lobengula, and claimed by both. It is, at present, uninhabited and unproductive, flat and uninteresting, and continues as far as Fort Tuli, on the Shashi River, after crossing which we entered the country which comes under the direct influence of Lobengula, the vaguely defined territory which under the name of Mashonaland is now governed by the Chartered Company.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MASHONALAND

All the people and tribes around Zimbabwe, down to the Sabi River and north to Fort Charter--and this is the most populous part of the whole country--call themselves by one name, though they are divided into many tribes, and that name is Makalanga. In answer to questions as to nationality they invariably call themselves Makalangas, in contradistinction to the Shangans, who inhabit the east side of the Sabi River. 'You will find many Makalangas there,' 'A Makalanga is buried there,' and so on. The race is exceedingly numerous, and certain British and Dutch pioneers have given them various names, such as Banyai and Mak?laka, which latter they imagine to be a Zulu term of reproach for a limited number of people who act as slaves and herdsmen for the Matabele down by the Shashi and Lundi Rivers. I contend that all these people call themselves Makal?ngas, and that their land should by right be called Makalangaland.

In this theory, formed on the spot from intercourse with the natives, I was glad to find afterwards that I am ably supported by the Portuguese writer Father dos Santos, to whom frequent allusion will be made in these pages. He says, 'The Monomatapa and all his vassals are Mocarangas, a name which they have because they live in the land of Mocaranga, and talk the language called Mocaranga, which is the best and most polished of all Kaffir languages which I have seen in this Ethiopia.' Couto, another Portuguese writer, bears testimony to the same point, and every one knows the tendency of the Portuguese to substitute r for l. Umtali is called by the Portuguese Umtare; 'blanco' is 'branco' in Portuguese, and numerous similar instances could be adduced; hence with this small Portuguese variant the names are identical. Father Torrend, in his late work on this part of the country, states, 'The Karanga certainly have been for centuries the paramount tribe of the vast empire of Monomatapa,' and the best derivation that suggests itself is the initial Ma or Ba, 'children,' ka, 'of,' langa, 'the sun.' They are an Abantu race, akin to the Zulus, only a weaker branch whose day is over. Several tribes of Bakalanga came into Natal in 1720, forced down by the powerful Zulu hordes, with traditions of having once formed a part of a powerful tribe further north. Three centuries and a half ago, when the Portuguese first visited the country, they were then all-powerful in this country, and were ruled over by a chief with the dynastic name of Monomatapa, which community split up, like all Kaffir combinations do after a generation or so, into a hopeless state of disintegration. Each petty chief still has his high-sounding dynastic name, like the Monomatapa or the Pharaoh of his day. Chibi, M'tegeza, M'toko, and countless lesser names are as hereditary as the chiefdoms themselves, and each chief, as he succeeds, drops his own identity and takes the tribal appellative. Such, briefly, is the political aspect of the country we are about to enter.

This is a strange, weird country to look upon, and after the flat monotony of Bechuanaland a perfect paradise. The granite hills are so oddly fantastic in their forms; the deep river-beds so richly luxuriant in their wealth of tropical vegetation; the great baobab trees, the elephants of the vegetable world, so antediluvian in their aspect. Here one would never be surprised to come across the roc's egg of Sindbad or the golden valley of Rasselas; the dreams of the old Arabian story-tellers here seem to have a reality.

Our first real intercourse with the natives was at a lovely spot called Inyamanda, where we 'outspanned' on a small plain surrounded by domed granite kopjes, near the summit of one of which is a cluster of villages.

Here we unpacked our beads and our cloth, and commenced African trading in real earnest; what money we had we put away in our boxes, and never wanted it again during our stay in the country. The naked natives swarmed around us like flies, with grain, flour, sour milk, and honey, which commodities can be acquired for a few beads; but for a sheep they wanted a blanket, for meat is scarce enough and valuable amongst this much-raided people. We lost an ox here by one of the many sicknesses fatal to cattle in this region, and the natives hovered round him like vultures till the breath was out of his body; they then fell on him and tore him limb from limb, and commenced their detestable orgy. As one watched them eat, one could imagine that it is not so many generations since they emerged from a state of cannibalism.

We found it a tough climb to the villages through the luxuriant verdure of cactus-like euphorbia, india-rubber tree, the castor-oil, and acacia with lovely red flowers. At an elevation of five hundred feet above our waggons were the mud huts of the people, and up here every night they drive their cattle into extraordinary rock stables for safety. Perched on the rocks are countless circular granaries, constructed of bright red mud and thatched with grass. One would think that a good storm of wind would blow them all away, so frail do they seem.

Rounding a corner of the hill we came across a second village, nestling amongst stupendous boulders, and ascending again a little higher we reached a third by means of a natural tunnel in the rock, fortified, despite its inaccessible position, with palisades.

The natives were somewhat shy of us, and fled to rocky eyries from whence to contemplate us, seated in rows in all sorts of uncomfortable angles, for all the world like monkeys. They are utterly unaccustomed to postures of comfort, reclining at night-time on a grass mat on the hard ground, with their necks resting on a wooden pillow, curiously carved; they are accustomed to decorate their hair so fantastically with tufts ornamentally arranged and tied up with beads that they are afraid of destroying the effect, and hence these pillows.

These pillows are many of them pretty objects, and decorated with curious patterns, the favourite one being the female breast, and resting on legs which had evidently been evolved out of the human form. They bear a close and curious resemblance to the wooden head-rests used by the Egyptians in their tombs to support the head of the deceased, specimens of which are seen in the British Museum. They are common all over Africa, and elsewhere amongst savage tribes where special attention is paid to the decoration of the hair.

A Makalanga is by nature vain, and particular about the appearance of his nudity; the ladies have fashions in beads and cloths, like our ladies at home, and before visiting a fresh kraal our men used to love to polish themselves like mahogany, by chewing the monkey-nut and rubbing their skins with it, good-naturedly doing each other's backs and inaccessible corners. Somehow they know what becomes them too, twisting tin ornaments, made from our meat tins, into their black hair. Just now they will have nothing but red beads with white eyes, which they thread into necklaces and various ornaments, and which look uncommonly well on their dark skins; and though it seems somewhat paradoxical to say so of naked savages, yet I consider no one has better taste in dress than they have until a hybrid civilisation is introduced amongst them.

From many of the huts at Inyamanda were hanging their dollasses--wooden charms, on which are drawn strange figures. Each family possesses a set of four tied together by a string. Of these four one always has a curious conventional form of a lizard carved on it; others have battle axes, diamond patterns, and so forth, invariably repeating themselves, and the purport of which I was never able to ascertain. They are common amongst all the Abantu races, and closely bound up with their occult belief in witchcraft; they are chiefly made of wood, but sometimes neat little ones of bone are found, a set of which I afterwards obtained.

On the evening of the new moon they will seat themselves in a circle, and the village witch doctor will go round, tossing each man's set of dollasses in the air, and by the way they turn up he will divine the fortune of the individual for the month that is to come.

There are many odds and ends of interest scattered about a Makalanga village; there is the drum, from two to four feet in height, covered with zebra or other skin, platted baskets for straining beer, and long-handled gourds, with queer diagonal patterns in black done upon them, which serve as ladles. Most of their domestic implements are made of wood--wooden pestles and wooden mortars for crushing grain, wooden spoons and wooden platters often decorated with pretty zigzag patterns. Natural objects, too, are largely used for personal ornaments. Anklets and necklaces are made out of mimosa pods; necklaces, really quite pretty to look upon, are constructed out of chicken bones; birds' claws and beaks, and the seeds of various plants, are constantly employed for the same purpose. Grass is neatly woven into chaplets, and a Makalanga is never satisfied unless he has a strange bird's feather stuck jauntily in his woolly locks.

Never shall I forget the view from the summit of Inyamanda Rock over the country ruled over by the chief Matipi; the horizon is cut by countless odd-peaked kopjes, some like spires, some like domes, grey and weird, rising out of rich vegetation, getting bluer and bluer in the far distance, and there is always something indescribably rich about the blueness of an African distance. As we descended we passed a wide-spreading tree hung with rich yellow maize pods drying in the sun. Here, too, the bright coral red flowers of the Erythrina kaffra were just coming out. Richness of colour seemed to pervade everything.

The Lundi River was the only one of the great rivers which flow through this portion of the country which gave us any real trouble. Our waggons had to be unloaded and our effects carried across in a boat, and the waggons dragged through the rushing stream by both teams of oxen; it was an exciting scene, and the place was crowded with people in the same condition as ourselves. On reaching the left bank we halted in a shady spot, and encamped for two days, in order to give our oxen rest and to study the ruin. It was a very charming spot, with fine rocky kopjes here and there, rich vegetation, and the dull roar of the fine stream about fifty feet below us. From one of the kopjes we got a lovely view up the river, over the thickly wooded flats on either side and the Bufwa range of mountains beyond.

The country beyond the Lundi is thickly populated, with native villages perched on rocky heights, many of which we saw as we wended our slow way through the Naka pass. One hill is inhabited by a tribe of human beings, the next by a tribe of baboons, and I must say these aborigines of the country on the face of it seem more closely allied to one another than they are to the race of white men, who are now appropriating the territory of both. The natives, living as they do in their hill-set villages on the top of the granite kopjes, are nimble as goats, cowardly yet friendly to the white stranger. They are constantly engaged in intertribal wars, stealing each other's women and cattle when opportunity occurs, and never dreaming of uniting against the common enemy, the Zulu, during whose periodical raids they perch themselves on the top of their inaccessible rocks, and look down complacently on the burning of their huts, the pillaging of their granaries, and the appropriation of their cattle. Under the thick jungle of trees by the roadside as we passed along we saw many acres under cultivation for the produce of sweet potatoes, beans, and the ground or monkey nut . They make long neat furrows with their hoes beneath the trees, the shade of which is necessary for their crops. They are an essentially industrious race, far more so than the Kaffirs of our South African colonies. Here the men work in the fields, leaving the women to make pots, build granaries, and carry water. In the Colony women are the chief agriculturists.

We spent a long and pleasant day within a few yards of another village called M'lala in Chibi's country, also perched on a rocky eminence, where many objects of interest came before our notice.

Here for the first time we saw the iron furnaces in which the natives smelt the iron ore they obtain from the neighbouring mountains. This is a time-honoured industry in Mashonaland. Dos Santos alludes to it in his description, and so do Arab writers of the ninth and tenth centuries, as practised by the savages of their day. In Chibi's country iron-smelting is a great industry. Here whole villages devote all their time and energies to it, tilling no land and keeping no cattle, but exchanging their iron-headed assegais, barbed arrow-heads, and field tools for grain and such domestic commodities as they may require. I am told also of villages which, after the same fashion, have a monopoly of pot-making. This industry is mostly carried on by the women, who deftly build up with clay, on round stands made for the purpose, large pots for domestic use, which they scrape smooth with large shells kept for this object, and then they give them a sort of black glaze with plumbago. In exchange for one of these pots they get as much grain as it will hold.

The native iron furnace is a curious object to look upon. It is made of clay, and is another instance of the design being taken from the human form, for it is made to represent a seated woman; the head is the chimney, decorated in some cases with eyes, nose, and mouth, resting on shoulders; the legs are stretched out and form the sides of the furnace, and to complete the picture they decorate the front with breasts and the tattoo decorations usually found on female stomachs. They heat the charcoal in the furnace by means of air pumped out of goat-skin bellows through clay blow-pipes fixed into the embers. It is a quaint sight to see them at work with all their commodities--pillows, knives, and assegais, fixed on to the reed walls which shut off the forge from the outer world.

At M'lala too we were first introduced to the women who have their stomachs decorated with many long lines, or cicatrices. Between thirty and forty of these lines ran across their stomachs, executed with surprising regularity, and resembling the furrows on a ploughed field. In vain we tried to photograph and count them. On one occasion I succeeded in counting sixteen furrows, when the bashful female ran away, and I think I had done about half. This is the favourite pattern in Chibi's country and with the neighbouring dependent tribes for female decoration, and they admire it so much that they put it also on their drums, on their granaries, and on their pillows, and, as I have said, on their forges. 'The breast and furrow' pattern, one might technically term it, and I fancy it has to do with an occult idea of fertility.

One of these oddly marked ladies was busily engaged in building a granary on a rock. She first lays a circular foundation of mud, into which she puts sticks. On to these she plasters mud until the funnel-shaped thing is about three feet high. A hole is left near the top for inserting and extracting the grain, and it is then thatched with grass; and it effectually keeps out the many rats and mice which swarm in these parts. The costume of these natives is extremely limited. A man is content with two cat-skins, one in front and one behind, though the latter is not always de rigueur. The women wear leathern aprons and girdles, tied so tightly as almost to cut them in two, and made of several long strips of leather, like boot-laces fastened together. On to these they hang all the necessaries of their primitive life. At present old cartridge cases are the fashion for holding snuff, or decorated reeds, or wooden cases. Then they have a few decorated bone ornaments, evidently of a mystic character; a skin-scraper or two with which to perform their toilette, which articles are of the form and shape of the strigil known to us from classical times, and the ends of the boot-laces are elegantly finished off with brass or copper beads. The needle, too, is a feature seldom absent from the man's neck and girdle, being a sharp-pointed bit of iron or brass with which they pierce the skins and fasten them together with threads of bark; these needles are fitted into a wooden case, which the more fanciful decorate with bands of brass wire.

At M'lala too we saw the blind witch-doctor of the village, dressed in all his savage toggery. Small gourds with seeds inside to rattle were tied to his calves. These are the fruit of the Oncoba spinosa. A buck's horn with a chain was hung round his neck, with which he made a hideous noise. Odd chains of beads decorated his neck, made out of the pods of the Acacia litakunensis, and his arms and legs were a mass of brass bracelets and anklets; and his hair resplendent with feathers completed the fantastic appearance of this poor blind man, who danced before us unceasingly, and made such hideous noises that we were obliged to give him some beads and ask him to stop.

The pass through which the road leads up from the river country to Fort Victoria is now called 'Providential,' by reason of the fact that the pioneer force of the Chartered Company did not know how to get over the range of hills rising to the north of the Tokwe River, until Mr. Selous chanced to hit on this gully between the mountains leading up to the higher plateau. Its scenery, to my mind, is distinctly overrated. It is green and luxuriant in tropical vegetation, with the bubbling stream Godobgwe running down it. The hills on either side are fairly fine, but it could be surpassed easily in Wales and Scotland, or even Yorkshire. In point of fact, the scenery of Mashonaland is nothing if not quaint. Providential Pass is distinctly commonplace, whereas the granite kopje scenery is the quaintest form of landscape I have ever seen.

Fort Victoria has no redeeming point of beauty about it whatsoever, being placed on a bare flat plateau, surrounded in the rainy season by swamps. Nearly everybody was down with fever when we got there; provisions were at famine prices--for example, seven shillings for a pound of bacon and the same price for a tin of jam--and the melancholy aspect of affairs was enhanced by the hundred and fifty saddles placed in rows within the fort, which had once belonged to the hundred and fifty horses brought up by the pioneers, all of which had died of horse sickness.

The diseases to which quadrupeds are subject in this country are appalling. One man of our acquaintance brought up eighty-seven horses, of which eighty-six died before he got to Fort Victoria. The still mysterious disease called horse sickness is supposed to come from grazing in the early dew, but of this nobody is as yet sure; the poor animals die in a few hours of suffocation, and none but 'salted horses,' i.e. horses which have had the disease and recovered, are of any use up here. Our three horses were warranted salted, but this did not prevent one of them from having a recurrence of the disease, which gave us a horrible fright and caused us to expend a whole bottle of whisky on it, to which we fondly imagine it owes its life. Another horse also gave us a similar alarm. One morning its nose was terribly swollen, and the experienced professed to see signs of the sickness in its eye. Nevertheless nothing came of it, and in due course the swelling went down. On close enquiry we discovered that it had been foolishly tied for the night to a euphorbia tree, and had pricked its nose with the poisonous thorns.

As for oxen, the diseases they are subject to make one wonder that any of them ever get up country alive; besides the fatal lung sickness they suffer from what is called the 'drunk sickness,' a species of staggers. When we reached Zimbabwe nearly all our oxen developed the mange and swollen legs, but recovered owing to the long rest. Besides these casualties they often die from eating poisonous grasses; also in some parts the unwholesome herbage, or 'sour veldt,' as it is known amongst the drivers, produces kidney diseases and other horrors amongst them.

All around Fort Victoria, they told us, the grass was sour, so we only remained there long enough to make our preparations for our excavations at Zimbabwe. Tools of all descriptions we had luckily brought with us from Fort Tuli, as there were none here when we arrived. In fact the dearth of everything struck us forcibly, but by this time doubtless all this will be remedied, for we were amongst the first waggons to come up after the rains, and now Fort Victoria, with the recent discovery of good gold reefs in its immediate vicinity, is bound to become an important place.

From Fort Victoria our real troubles of progression began. It is only fourteen miles from there to the great Zimbabwe ruins by the narrow Kaffir path, and active individuals have been known to go there and back in a day. It took us exactly seven days to traverse this distance with our waggons. The cutting down of trees, the skirting of swamps, the making of corduroy bridges, were amongst the hindrances which impeded our progress. For our men it was a perpetual time of toil; for us it was a week of excessive weariness.

For two nights we were 'outspanned' by the edge of a deep ravine, at the bottom of which was a swampy stream. This had to be bridged with trees and a road made up and down the banks before our waggons could cross over it. A few hundred yards from this spot the river M'shagashi flowed, a considerable stream, which is within easy reach of Zimbabwe and eventually makes its way down to the Tokwe. On its banks we saw several crocodiles basking, and consequently resisted the temptation to bathe.

At the correct season of the year they go off in groups into the forests to collect bark, taking with them their wives and their children, carrying with them their assegais, and fine barbed arrows with which they shoot mice, a delicacy greatly beloved by them; they take with them also bags of mealies for food, and collect bags of caterpillars--brown hairy caterpillars three inches long, which at this season of the year swarm on the trees. These they disembowel and eat in enormous quantities, and what they cannot eat on the expedition they dry in the sun and take home for future consumption. Their only method of making a fire is by rubbing two sticks dexterously together until a spark appears, with which they ignite some tinder carried in a little wooden box attached to their girdles. At night time they cut down branches from the trees, and make a shelter for themselves from the wind. It is curious to see a set of natives asleep, like sardines in a box, one black naked lump of humanity; if one turns or disturbs the harmony of the pie they all get up and swear at him and settle down again. One man is always told off to watch the fire to keep off wild beasts, and then when morning comes they pack their belongings, their treasures of bark, mice, and caterpillars, and start off along the narrow path in single file at a tremendous pace, silent for a while, and then bursting forth into song, looking for all the world like a procession of black caterpillars themselves.

These forests around Zimbabwe are lovely to wander in, with feathery festoons of lichen, like a fairy scene at a pantomime; outside the forests are long stretches of coarse grass, towering above our heads in many cases, and horrible to have to push through, especially after a fall of rain. They were then in seed, and looked just like our harvest fields at home, giving a golden tinge to the whole country.

Fine trees perched on the summit of colossal ant-hills cast a pleasant shade around, and if by chance we were near a stream we had to be careful not to fall into game pits, deep narrow holes hidden by the long grass, which the natives dig in the ground and towards which they drive deer and antelope, so that they get their forelegs fixed in them and cannot get out.

All around Zimbabwe is far too well watered to be pleasant; long stretches of unhealthy swamps fill up the valleys; rivers and streams are plentiful, and the vegetation consequently rich. Owing to the surrounding swamps we had much fever in our camp during our two months' stay; as we had our waggons with us we could not camp on very high ground, and suffered accordingly. This fever of the high veldt with plenty of food and plenty of quinine is by no means dangerous, only oft-recurring and very weakening. Of the fourteen cases we had under treatment none were really dangerously ill, and none seemed to suffer from bad effects afterwards when the fever had worn itself out. The real cause of so much mortality and misery amongst the pioneer force during their first wet season in the country was the want of nourishing food to give the fever patients and the want of proper medicine.

This Kaffir beer is certainly an old-world drink. There are several classical allusions for what is termed 'barley beer.' Xenophon and the Ten Thousand one evening, on reaching an Armenian village in the mountains of Asia Minor, refreshed themselves with what he describes as 'bowls of barley wine in which the grains are floating.'

The Egyptians too made beer after the same fashion, and used it also in sacrifices. Much that was known in the old world has travelled southwards through Nubia and Abyssinia, and is to be found still amongst the Kaffir races of to-day. Some of the words in common use amongst the Kaffirs in Mashonaland are very curious. Anything small, whether it be a child or to indicate that the price paid for anything is insufficient, they term piccanini; the word is universal, and points to intercourse with other continents. The term Morunko, or Molungo, universally applied to white men, is probably of Zulu origin, and has been connected--with what reason I know not--with Unkulunkulu, a term to denote the Supreme Being. At any rate it is distinctly a term of respect, and certainly has nothing to do with the Mashona language, in which Muali or Mali is used to denote God.

Finally, at long last, after exactly three months to a day of 'trekking' in our ox waggons, the mighty ruins of Zimbabwe were reached on June 6, 1891, and we sat down in the wilderness to commence our operations, with the supreme delight of knowing that for two months our beds would not begin to shake and tumble us about before half our nights were over.

CAMP LIFE AND WORK AT ZIMBABWE

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