The Bonds of Africa

O Smithsonian
Institution
Libraries
From the
RUSSELL E. TRAIN
AFRICANA COLLECTION
fir. x. n
THE BONDS OF AFRICA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
BIG-GAME HUNTING IN
NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA
BY
OWEN LETCHER, F.R.G.S.

With Portrait of Author in Photogravure
and 52 Illustrations from Photographs. Demy 8vo
Price 12s. 6d. net
Daily Telegraph.—“Descriptions, opinions, and information

as to the country, the people and their habits, serve to make the
book not only entertaining, but useful, informative, and of
permanent value.”
Morning Post.—“There are some really delightful descrip¬

tions of scenery and camp life in the wilds, and Mr. Letcher
contrives to impart to his readers the fascination of those
‘strangely seductive regions.’”
Outlook.—“ The book has the merit that it may be read with
equal interest by big-game hunter and arm-chair sportsman.”
Pall Mall Gazette.—“ An acceptable addition to African travel

and hunting literature. Conveys an interesting impression of
the nature of the country. The tale is that of a true sportsman,
keen withal, and also observant. ”
Johannesburg Star.—“ Mr. Owen Letcher has brought the

pastime of hunting to our doors; his entertaining narrative almost
persuades us that we too might be following the spoor of our
first lion. Partly because of his delightfully readable diary of
his doings, and partly because of his valuable notes on the game
of the country, his book makes a bold bid to be reckoned as
one of the few permanent contributions to the literature of great-
game hunting in British territory south of the Line. ”
JOHN LONG, LTD., LONDON

The Bonds of Africa
Impressions of Travel and Sport
from Cape Town to Cairo 1902-1912
BY
OWEN LETCHER, F.R.G.S.

AUTHOR OF
“BIG-GAME HUNTING IN NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA”
WITH FIFTY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

AND A MAP
LONDON
JOHN LONG, LIMITED
NORRIS STREET, HAYMARKET
MGMXIII
TO AFRICA
TO
“THE legion of the lost ones”
TO
“THE COHORT OF THE DAMNED”

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I In the Beginning—A Preamble . . .13
II North-Western Rhodesia . . . .17

The Stage of Nature
III Mashonaland.36
From Salisbury to the Portuguese Frontier
IY Portuguese East Africa . . . .52

To the City of Siestas and Beyond
Y North-Eastern Rhodesia . . . .70

In Exile
YI North-Eastern Rhodesia (continued) . . 87

Equatorial Fables—The Joys of Freedom
YII North-Eastern Rhodesia (continued) . .100

In the Grip of the Wilds
YIII Nyasaland and the Lower Zambesi . .121

A Colony of Tribulations and an East Coast
Golgotha
IX The East Coast.145

A Citadel and a Beryl Islet
X The East Coast (continued) . . . .161

Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa
XI British East Africa.174

TO THE NYIKA-BOUND NORTH
XII British East Africa (continued) . . .185

Towards the Lorian
XIII British East Africa (continued) . . . 207

On Safari to Sotik
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
XIY British East Africa (continued) . 225
More Hunting in Sotik—Kijabe Mountain
XY Uganda. . 236
The Devil in God’s Garden
XYI Egypt. . 243

To the Celestial City
XYII Egypt (continued) ..... , 250

Dreams of the Desert
XYIII Finis. . 259
Index ....... . 261

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
To face page
Crossing the Ruenya River, Portuguese East

Africa.Frontispiece
The Victoria Falls, Zambesi River, in Full Flood 18
The Devil’s Cataract, Victoria Falls ... 18
The Kafue River, spanned by the Longest Bridge

in Africa.20
Buffalo Cow and Native Hunters .... 26
Buffalo Hunting in North-Western Rhodesia. A

Fine Bull.30
A Puku Shot near the Great Lukanga Swamp . 30
Colonel Carden’s Barotse Police Boys, Broken

Hill.34
One of the Mineralized Kopjes at Broken Hill,

Rhodesia.34
One of our Donkeys crossing the Inyagui River 38
A Typical Mashona Family; Tshanoia River . . 42
Prospector’s Camp; Mashonaland .... 60
Portuguese Gun-boat on the Zambesi at Tete . 62
Native Archer; Portuguese Northern Zambesia . 68
Cutting up a Hippo; Luangwa River ... 74
Puku Antelope, a Water-loving Buck; Northern

Rhodesia.84
Elephant; Luangwa Valley.102
Native Woman; Northern Rhodesia .... 116
A Fine Reedbuck Head; Northern Rhodesia . . 116
A Wart Hog; British Central Africa . . . 130
On “IJlendo”; British Central Africa . . . 130

ix
X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
To face page
Embarking Passengers off Chinde .... 140
Roan Antelope ; British Central Africa . . . 140
Delagoa Bay: the Gateway of the Transvaal . 146
Bronson and the Beira Express .... 146
In Sandy Beira: the Gateway of Rhodesia . . 146
Street Scene in Zanzibar ...... 156
The Gateway of Port San Sebastian, Mozambique . 156
A Fine Old Arab Doorway, Zanzibar . . .156
The Old Fort, Mombasa ..168
Indian Snake Charmer, Mombasa .... 168
Falls on the Chania River between Nairobi and

Fort Hall..176
A Group of Kikuyu on the Embu Road . . . 176
The Author and a Buffalo near Embu . . . 180
Mutuwa and his Truculent Headmen . . . 180
Buffalo Bull; Northern Guaso Nyiro River . . 186
My Best Gerenuk.186
On Guard: Kikuyu El Moran ..... 190
Reticulated Giraffe; Northern Guaso Nyiro River 190
Elmi and Oryx, Beisa; Northern Guaso Nyiro

River ......... 194
In a Samburu “Manyatta”.204
Elmi and Gerenuk Ram ...... 204
Elmi and Female Gerenuk.210
A Fine East African Imp ala.226
Bohor Reedbuck, Mau Escarpment .... 226
Kavirondo Women on the Mau Escarpment . . 238
River Nile, a Mile from its Source, near Jinga,

Uganda.238
Cairo, The Porch of Shepheard’s Hotel . . . 246
The Great Pyramid of Cheops.250
The Silent Watcher ....... 254

PREFACE
It has been my lot to travel over much of

the Continent of Africa, and in these pages I have
endeavoured to place on record some of my
wanderings, to describe the wondrous beauties,
scenes of savagery, old-world towns, and hordes
of wild men and wild beasts which are still the
treasures of the Last Continent.
For permission to reproduce certain articles
and photographs contributed by me to the Star
and Illustrated Star, Sunday Post and Observer,
Johannesburg, The State, Cape Town, and the
African World, London, I am indebted to the
Editors of these papers. All the photographs
appearing in this book were either taken by my
native attendants or myself. The only claim
I make for the work is that it is an honest attempt
to describe the experiences, impressions and
sensations of one who has truly felt the all-
powerful influence and fascination of Africa in
a multitude of highways and byways, from Table
Bay to the city of the Pharaohs, and who has
found in her bondage a serfdom glorious and
strangely easy.
Johannesburg, 19 IS
xi
THE BONDS OF AFRICA
CHAPTER I
IN THE BEGINNING—A PREAMBLE
Out of the dim haze of the morning a faint

blue ridge stood feebly up and relieved the mono¬
tony of that nebulous blending of sea and sky
which is the daily vision of those who go down
into the deep in ships. The white wings of the
ocean broke before the steamer’s bow and tumbled
idly back again into the vast acreage of the waters
as the ship sped towards the blur on the far-away
line where ocean and clouds mingled—the blur
that meant land. An hour went by and the ridge
assumed the shape of a giant table with soft,
fleecy clouds as a table-cloth. It looked as though
its great flat top was pressed against the very
floor of Heaven. A little while and white shapes
clustering at the foot of the towering rock mass
could be distinguished; they might have been
crumbs fallen from the snow-white covering of
the table. An hour later the anchor was dropping
in the Cape Town roadstead; Table Mountain
and Lion’s Castle seemed to frown down a cold
welcome, and the streets and houses and sur¬
roundings of the most southern port in Africa
afforded the watchers on the decks cause for much
interest and speculation. How did the railway
scale that forbidding escarpment ? What were the
13
14 THE BONDS OF AFRICA
lands that lay beyond? What was in store for
each one of us in that vast continent of which only
the sole lay bared to our emigrant eyes ? What
should we find there—fortune and favour and
an abiding home ? or ill luck, the dormitories of
sickness, and perhaps a grave amidst the silence
of the unknown ? Who could tell ? Who, could
they know, would wish that the story of their
future should be spelled out in the cold, cruel
letters of Fate before their eyes? Some of us
who stood that morning on the decks of the liner
have found fame and riches in Africa. Some
have dug deep graves and tumbled their reputa¬
tions into them for hurried burial. And for some,
other hands have delved that the pits might be
deep enough. Some have remained, others have
gone away harbouring deep wounds of regret,
and then have returned.
What strange, all-powerful influence is there
in Africa that draws men and women back to her ?
For what do they return? Is it to regain
the waking remnants of a dream once so sweet and
seemingly so real? Do they go back to snatch
from the fickle goddesses of Mammon and Life
lost riches or health that has blown away like
eider on a tempest ?
I cannot tell. Maybe it is the great brooding
stillness of the veld that has called them to the
farm and lonely trading store. Others have been
summoned by the far-away vastness of the
interior, and the summons has brooked no refusal.
To see the first blushes of the dawn steal over
plain and forest and river; to watch the splendour
of the young day flood mountain ranges and broad
lakes with glory; to see the sun exultant in the
cruelty of his mid-day strength hug the earth
in an embrace of fire, or to rest one’s eyes on
IN THE BEGINNING-A PREAMBLE 15
the soft glows and dying glamours of the dusk

—these are things that are meet reward for
beds of fever and the heartless ministerings
of hardship.
To hear the night winds sobbing down the
valleys; to listen to the trumpeting scream of
an elephant or the majestic roar of the lion;
to have the sounds of native revelry wafted on
the still air to one’s tent door—these are the
relishes of existence.
Not only in the wilds does the spell of Africa
grip one. Who that has travelled along the
East Coast can forget the old-world beauty of
Mozambique, the colour riot of Zanzibar, the
verdure of the island of Mombasa against which
the sapphire seas break in snow-white foam?
If you have seen the illimitable sands of the
Egyptian and Soudanese deserts, or from the
Citadel watched the peace of eventide sink over
Cairo; if you have drunk Nile water or day¬
dreamed below the mystic Sphinx—can you ever
forget these things or turn their memories into
the alleyways of the mind? And who that has
hunted big game does not at times feel the passion
of the chase and the surge of an almost irresistible
wave of longing, years after those halcyon times
when life was unfettered and the world seemed
to be at one’s feet ?
Most of us are savages at heart. Deep down
in the smug contentment of that hollow thing
we call civilization there smoulder the fires of
our Berserker ancestry. We wander in the great
vast untrodden spaces of the world, and the
dwindling flames blaze up in a furnace of primor¬
dial joy, the lusts of killing and freedom spurt up
in tongues of barbaric flame. Man may become
a savage again in the space of but a few years.
2
He may grow to detest the empty pleasures of
a hollow world, the rush and hurry of our great
cities will become phantoms of a ghastly night¬
mare, and there will stretch out before him a new
path along the roadway of life, a path without
the snares and pitfalls of the highway trodden
by the multitudes.
There are few men who have turned from the
beaten track in great, mysterious Africa who have
not realized that the instincts of our Stone-age
ancestors are not dead. They merely sleep; and
there is no tract on earth wherein they are so
easily awakened as in Africa.
It has been said of Africa that God raised
His Hand in anger and cursed it with all the
plagues of the universe. Yet here a man may
find a true joy and bury many of the ghosts of
the North lands, where the sky is grey and sullen
and forbidding. Those to whom Africa calls
rise from beds of sickness to answer her summons.
In this book the more modern and European
cities of Africa find no place or description.
Johannesburg is a wonder-town with as much
romance and event crammed into its quarter
of a century as any other place on earth. But
it is not Africa any more than clean, well-built
Durban is the Dark Continent. Gold mines and
diamond mines have crushed out of some parts
of the Last Continent much of her natural
mysticism and savagery, and one will seek in
vain in these pages for those monuments to
Industry and Finance which modern man has
erected in Africa by the sweat of his brow. For
these things are recorded in the world’s school¬
books, and this is but a fairy tale of playground
facts and fancies.
CHAPTER II
NORTH-WESTERN RHODESIA : THE STAGE

OF NATURE
It was in 1904 that I won my first glimpse of

the byways of Africa, and the few days that I
spent around the little mining village of Haenerts-
berg in a mountainous region of the Northern
Transvaal, where the land dives suddenly down
into the fever-ridden haze of the low country,
whetted my appetite for a longer sojourn in the
lesser-known parts of the continent. Two years
later the rolling, rumbling stage-coach bore me
farther north to Tsama River on the edge of the
Game Reserve, and it was then that I vowed to see
the very shrine of savage Africa, and worship
at the mysterious high altar to which so many
have made a last pilgrimage.
Thus it was in 1907 I journeyed to Bulawayo,
the Victoria Falls and Broken Hill, the then
rail-head of the Cape to Cairo line.
How many people, I wonder, properly appre¬
ciate what Cecil John Rhodes, Alfred Beit, and
those who have taken up the tasks of the two
dead Empire-builders have already achieved
in the colossal project of connecting up Cape
Town with Cairo by rail? How many realize
that you can to-day step into a comfortable train
at Table Bay and that the metals on which those
luxurious coaches run continue for 2,500 miles
to the north, that within a week you will be in
17
the Congo Free State, and that the great country
which only a few years ago was practically un¬
known, and which in several recent maps is
styled “ British Central Africa,” has, under the
name of North-Western Rhodesia, and under
the mantle of Rhodes and his far-seeing states¬
manship, become a great and valued dependency
of the British Empire ?
I will not dwell on Bulawayo, the modern
metropolis of Matabeleland, raised up on the
slaughter kraals of Lo Bengula, nor will I weary
you with a lengthy description of the Victoria
Falls, the Mecca of all South African tourists.
Many an able pen has attempted to describe
the wondrous loveliness of the Falls, and where
able pens have failed I can only hope to give the
weakest conception of the Zambesi rushing over
a great escarpment and then silently wending
its way down the dark gorges in a twisting and
twining path to the east. When first I saw the
Zambesi the river was in full flood (in April and
May), and the amount of water that was com¬
ing over the Falls then was too stupendous to
calculate.
Standing on one of the ledges which run out
from the Rain Forest and peering over into the
depths beneath, one felt as if he were on the
very edge of the world. The spray, the thunder
of the waters, and the beautiful rainbow effects
filled me with such awe that I turned away speech¬
less and amazed. It was as if I were standing
on the top of the highest ledge of the north cliffs
of Cornwall, and the Atlantic had determined
to destroy the land in a blind rage and fury.
And there on the other side the sea had conquered,
and the land was under the mighty hand of the
conqueror.
THE VICTORIA FALLS. ZAMBESI RIVER. IN FULL FLOOD
[To face p. 18
THE DEVIL’S CATARACT, VICTORIA FALLS
NORTH-WESTERN RHODESIA 19
At Livingstone I had to say good-bye to the

luxurious Zambesi express, and started on the
journey northwards in a less comfortable coach.
There was no more of the dining-saloon luxury
after Livingstone, and unless you would go hungry
to Broken Hill it was necessary to lay in a good
stock of food.
The Broken Hill train did not recognize time
to any material extent, and there are cases on
record of engine-drivers wounding buck and halt¬
ing the “ Congo Express 55 for two or three hours
to hunt down their game, a practice most em¬
phatically to be discouraged for many reasons.
Kalomo, then the seat of the administration
of North-Western Rhodesia, was situated about
three miles from the railway station, and a
traveller’s impressions of this “ metropolis ”
gathered from a passing train were not very
favourable. From all I could learn Kalomo
was extremely unhealthy. It is built on a sub¬
stratum of granite, which exists here chiefly
in the form of small cups and depressions, and
thus conserves water, mosquitoes and malaria.
It is not altogether to be wondered at that
the capital has since been removed to sandy
Livingstone.
Early the morning after leaving Livingstone we
were at the Kafue, gazing upon the broad and
majestic river, over a quarter of a mile broad,
and spanned by the longest bridge in Africa.
One cannot but have the highest admiration
for the pluck, the energy, and the perseverance
of those men who pushed the railway on from
the Zambesi in the face of transport difficulties,
fever, and a thousand and one other obstacles.
But the work has been done, and sceptics, who re¬
gard the Cape to Cairo scheme as the hare-brained
conception of a parcel of insane conceivers,
should see for themselves what already has been
achieved, before they doubt what can be accom¬
plished. Kafue at the time of my visit contained
a number of fever patients. That terrible scourge
of the country, blackwater, seemed to be very
common there. On the river were a number of
launches, and, as my companions were desirous
of purchasing a boat for navigating the Luangwa
River, which runs into the Zambesi at Feira,
we went down to the grass- and reed-clad banks,
and inspected the flotilla.
The dents in the sides of one or two of the boats
told interesting stories of encounters with hippo¬
potami, which are very plentiful in the Kafue
and Luangwa.
It is a great pity that the Kafue is not navigable
right up to the mines of the 4 4 Western Copper
Group”—Sable Antelope, Silver King, Rhino, and
Hippo properties—as it would greatly facilitate
the opening up of these ventures, if it were. Still
the river is certain to play an important part
in the industrial history of the country.
The railway rises from an altitude of 3,000 feet
to 4,000 feet between Kafue and Broken Hill,
and the trees to the north of the river are notably
taller and less bush-like than those to the south.
At one of the little wayside gangers’ houses,
which serve as stations, a man crawled on the train,
and gave us children in a strange land a glimpse
of what some of the North-Western pioneers
have to bear. He was not an old man, when you
came to look at him closely, by no means old,
but his form was so emaciated by fever that one
would at first sight have put him down to be
sixty-five or seventy. His skin was yellow, his
eyes wild with malaria, three fingers on one hand
[To face . 20
THE KAFUE RIVER, SPANNED BY THE LONGEST
BRIDGE IN AFRICA
had been bitten off by a wounded lion, and his

arm was festered with a great scab- anothcr
evidence of the lion’s mauling ability. He was
going to Broken Hill Hospital with his rifle, his
blankets, and his water-bottle, and the sight
of his sufferings somewhat damped my pioneer
ambitions, which had been steadily rising for
days.
Mwomboshi, a small station which then boasted
of a native commissioner, police station, and
magistrate, was soon passed, and about half-past
five in the evening we were at Broken Hill, at
that time the headquarters of the Northern
Copper Company, and a busy little mining camp.
The world is after all extremely narrow, and
before I had been in Broken Hill long, I had met
an old Truro College boy, against whom I had
often played football and cricket when at Probus
in Cornwall.
Colonel Carden, commanding the stalwart
Barotseland Police—who, by the way, were largely
Angonis—had just come down from Katanga
when I arrived in camp. He took a very keen
interest in his corps, and was justly proud of his
smart boys, who had recently given evidence of a
strong musical trait, and formed a fife and drum
band, which played outside the officers’ mess at
Kalomo every night.
I went on a mile or two past rail-head, and
soon realized how utterly hopeless it was to
attempt any shooting until the grass was burnt
down.
I well remember my farthest north in South
Central Africa on that occasion. Standing on a
hillock, I could see over the sea of grass, dotted
here and there with splendid trees, to a purple
line on the horizon, where the land and the sky
seemed to kiss each other. There, to the north,
was Cairo, behind me was Cape Town. The life
desire of Rhodes was to link these two distant
cities up, and standing there, 2,000 miles from
the one and 3,000 from the other, I could not help
forgetting big game and all else but the greatness
of this man, who, had he lived, would have altered
the map of all Africa, just as he changed the
political charts of South Africa; whose greatest
pleasure was to dream of his pet project, and
who died all too soon for the British Empire
in the Dark Continent. Floreat Rhodesia! If
the man has gone, he has half a continent to
keep his name living and to make his fame
eternal.
Over three years went by, and again I crossed
the great, yawning gorge into which the Zambesi
falls, as though to lose itself for ever. Again
I was borne across the broad expanse of the noble
Kafue, and as night fell the twinkle of lights told
me that Broken Hill had been reached.
It was a different Broken Hill to that which I
had seen but forty months before. Grass grew
in the calciner station; there was no sign of life
on the kopjes; the gaunt rocks of zinc and lead
stood up as the tombstones of an ill-starred
venture.
I did not stay in Broken Hill long. Tales of
great herds of game towards M’Kushi induced
me to get together a little “ ulendo,” or caravan;
and three nights after I had stepped off the train
I was camped by the M’Lungushi river, watching
the smoke from my pipe trail upwards towards
the glorious moon.
Kwamwendo, my hunter boy, soon found game;
and Sing Sing water-buck, Lichtenstein’s harte-
beeste, and reed-buck fell to my rifle. Here was
a delightful shooting country, with broad green

44 dambos 55 or clearings lying amidst a thin-
leafed forest. Rivulets coursed through rich
green grass, and in the morning the first majesty
of the sun fell on a myriad of little dewdrops
and made them glisten like jewels in the regalia
of a king. Birds chirped, and soft breezes sighed
and sobbed through the tree-tops. At night I
pitched my wandering tent in native villages and
listened to the pagan music of the simple savages
who surrounded me, Walonga and Walenje.
No one who has witnessed it can ever forget
the solemn glory of a moonlight night in these
forest lands which cover so much of Africa north
of the Zambesi—and, be it remembered, true
Africa only begins when the waters of the great
mother-river of the south have been crossed.
On such a night I was camped at Luvembe’s
village in the Walonga country, and as I puffed
silently at my pipe and the full splendour of the
mellow light of the moon mingled with the glow
of the camp-fires, I listened to the shouts of the
children of the continent squatting all around me
—the happiest race of mankind. There was an
abundance of meat in camp, for that morning
I had shot a Sing Sing water-buck and a harte-
beeste, and long strips of flesh were smoking
over each pile of blazing logs. Presently my
44 capitao,” or headman—a cheerful old fellow
who hailed from the Zambesi—approached me
and asked if I objected to a dance being held. I
readily acquiesced, and after the necessary pre¬
liminaries had been arranged and a little space
had been cleared of wood, skins and cooking-
pots between the camp-fires, I sauntered over
to watch the proceedings. And never have I
gazed on a more curious sight, or one more
fantastic in the absolute abandon of its savagery,
than that night dance of the Walonga.
Picture to yourself a number of groups of
women, with babies at breast and knee, squatting
round the blazing fires. Here the old chief of
the village is solemnly puffing at his huge pipe,
fashioned out of clay, a long reed and a cucumber¬
shaped calabash. A stalwart M’Longa steps into
the little open space between the fires, and altern¬
ately brandishes his spear above his head and
wriggles his body round like a dying snake, to
the accompaniment of a clapping of hands.
Two huge “ N’goma,” or war-drums, consist¬
ing of skins stretched tight and laced over the
hollowed-out trunks of trees, are brought forward,
and after being duly warmed by the fires, are
thumped by many pairs of hands. The sound
emitted is musical and dull, yet it travels for
an extraordinary distance. Two more Walonga
now join the performer in the arena, and, keeping
time with his fantastic movements, they look
in the lurid glow of the flames as though they were
loosed from Hades. Faster and faster beat the
drums, faster and faster do the dancers sway their
bodies and slice the air with the broad blades
of their assegais. At last the thud of the drums
stops abruptly and the dancers retire exhausted
to the ring of spectators.
A few seconds of silence elapse, and then some
one commences one of those singularly monotonous
yet beautiful native refrains, whereof the chorus
is hurled back like the rolling of thunder.
A clear, well-toned voice shouts out that to¬
morrow the “ Bwana ” * is going to kill a buffalo,
and there will be 46 nyama sambele ” (much
meat); the answer comes from a score or two
* Master.
of strong lungs, and breaks on the air after the

single voice like the ninth wave on a rock-bound
coast—44 Yes, the Bwana will kill a buffalo ! 55
For long the haunting melody of this refrain
fell on my ears, and then the dancers again broke
into a maddened swirl wherein passion and lust
were the keynotes of the rhythm. Then again
a chant concerning the wild beasts of the forest
and the “dambo,” or clearing in the bush, and
afterwards a play in which the dramatis personae
were two Walonga hunters and two other natives,
the one with my water-buck horns on his head
and the other with a similar headgear in the shape
of a hartebeeste skull and horns. Round and
round crept the pseudo-antelopes; and round
and round them crept the hunters with spears
upraised and ready to kill. At last one Nimrod
came up silently behind the water-buck and thrust
at him with the great blade gleaming in the fire¬
light. Down fell the actor, still clenching his
horns, and he grovelled and rolled as his slayer
plunged again at him with the assegai. The
hartebeeste shared a similar fate, and then a
roar of applause burst from the onlookers,
especially from the direction of the women and
children, who evidently thought this the piece de
resistance of the entertainment. Once more
Luvembe’s people broke into a chant, and then
the drums beat fast and furious, and then silence,
all-pervading and absolute; and presently the
moon looked down on a cluster of grass-thatched
huts and a score of calico-clad forms huddled
together ’twixt logs and ashes, for the night was
a cold one. I wended my way back to my tent
and fell asleep, but not before I seemed once
again to see the writhing bodies half enveloped
in the flames, and once again to hear the roar of
many voices and the dull, insistent undertone
of the drums.
Primitive and crude, indeed, was the night’s ex¬
hibition, but true in its pagan representation
of passion and lust. Brute passion is typified in
savage man, and perhaps in civilized man as well;
it is an inheritance which has been brought down
through all the ages; to create and to kill are
desires which have survived all the influences of
progress.
Many of the dances which have roused the
theatres of Europe to unparalleled heights of
enthusiasm are merely the dance of the Walonga
without the camp-fire or the assegais or the naked
figures. Instead there are the stage-lights and
decapitation and butterfly wings. But if you
could have seen the abandon of Luvembe’s
people that night and heard the haunting beat
of the drums and the weird choir of the village,
you, too, would have thought that this night dance
was far more fantastic, far more striking, far
more likely to remain in memory that any execu¬
tion that has drawn forth raptures from the crowd.
It was, in fact, a passion play staged in every
detail in accordance with its primitive savagery,
and acted in keeping with the reality of its stage.
As day came stealing over bush and plain and
hillock, I was marshalling my carriers together
preparatory to a long day’s tramp after buffalo.
These magnificent great beasts—64 God’s cattle,”
as the Matabele used to call them—roam in great
numbers on the Congo-Zambesi watershed. One
large herd had been wandering around between
the Mwomboshi and M’Lungushi rivers for three
or four years, and after a day’s search my
hunter boys picked up the spoor of these animals.
Hours and hours of tramping brought us up
BUFFALO COW AND NATIVE HUNTERS
with the herd the next day. The bush was

exceedingly dense; and when I wounded an
animal and it got away we began to anticipate
trouble, for a wounded buffalo in dense cover is
as nasty a customer as one can wish for. An old
bull—in fact a buffalo of either sex which has
arrived at years of discretion and cunning favours
this plan of campaign when wounded—will often
double back on his tracks and charge his pursuer
in the rear. Frequently the buffalo gets a deal
the better of the game, and becomes hunter
instead of quarry with a vengeance. However,
this particular animal did not give us much
trouble, as I got in a couple of shots in the
lungs shortly afterwards, which brought the day’s
sport to a rapid finish.
That night the great herd walked right by my
camp. It was a direct challenge, and my hunter
boys, led by the ever-energetic Kwamwendo,
picked up fresh tracks just as the soft mellow
light of first day was robing the forest in a delicate
sheen of splendour. Before many minutes had
elapsed we saw great, black bodies feeding in a
44 dambo ” and leisurely sauntering towards the
bush. Ere they entered I crept up to within
sixty or seventy yards of a couple standing by
themselves and gazing curiously in my direction.
Singling out the bull, I let him have a 270-grain
bullet behind the shoulder. He made off for
the friendly shelter of some mopani trees, bellow¬
ing with pain and rage, but before he got there
I hit him twice more, and he fell over on his side
and breathed his bovine last.
Next morning I was again afoot very early,
and after a couple of hours’ spooring came up
with the herd in the heart of the forest. The
vegetation was extremely dense, but after a
great deal of peering I singled out what I judged
to be a good bull—I could distinctly see a very
fair spread of horns. The bullet hit with a telling
“ vup,” and I heard that low, moaning bellow
which a wounded buffalo invariably gives vent
to. No animal fell, however, and the whole
herd stampeded away with a thunder of hoofs
that shook the earth. We ran along the tracks,
and now and then the keen eyes of my native
hunters singled out a leaf with a few tell-tale
drops of blood on it. But after a while the blood
spoor ceased, and we decided that we must have
over-run the tracks of the wounded animal.
I thought of taking things easily for a while,
lit up a pipe, handed my rifle to a gun-bearer,
and casually sauntered along. Suddenly there
was a crashing in the bushes, and out dashed
the wounded animal, head upthrust, nostrils
blazing furnace red, the very incarnation of
diabolical fury. Kwamwendo, who carried my
spare rifle, cleared off in one direction; the
wretched bearer, with my old pet *375, dashed
off in another; the buffalo turned on me, and,
defenceless, I bolted for all I was worth.
Thorns with the talons of a lammergeyer pos¬
sessed no terrors for me then, and I don’t know
what might have happened had not Kwamwendo
—in some degree, I suppose, repentant—fired at
the infuriated brute with my falling block gun.
The buffalo then made towards him, and my
bearer summed up sufficient pluck to throw me
my rifle. I managed to administer the death-blow
without very much more difficulty, and found my
prize was a cow carrying a good head.
On my way back to camp that day I came
across a smaller herd of buffalo—probably a
detachment of the main army of the beasts—and
added yet one more magnificent trophy to

the bag. This latter head I presented to the
Bulawayo Museum.
As bearing on the important question of tsetse
fly and the alleged dependence of the fly on big
game, and particularly on the buffalo, it will
doubtless be of interest to mention that whilst
hunting this great herd of buffalo near Mwom-
boshi I saw only two tsetse flies in five days;
whereas twenty miles to the west of Mwomboshi
and at a lower altitude, where no traces of buffalo
were to be observed, I found tsetse painfully
plentiful.
Every one in this world has his own particular
and peculiar tastes, his own fairest scenes, his
own most beautiful pictures. A merry supper
party at the Savoy may represent one man’s
acme of bliss, to sit on some high-perched
pinnacle and watch the Atlantic breakers hurled
on to a rock-bound coast may be another’s.
But there surely cannot be a more grand or
sublime thing in this world than the break of
day over some wild yet inexpressibly lovely spot
in the by-paths of Central Africa, where all is
true and natural, as Creation intended things to
be, as free from artificiality as was the Garden
of Eden.
Picture to yourself such a scene. It is dawn.
Across the eastern sky shafts of yellow light are
brightening the sombre night shroud of the
heavens, and as each shaft gains in that soft
glow which heralds the morning, the twinkling
stars become less and less distinct, the trees take
on forms out of the disappearing dusk, the mounds
and ant-heaps loom up like small mountains, the
night-birds cease their callings, and the first
twitterings of the day commence. Cold and damp
feels the air, but its freshness is as the freshness
of the tender green blades which are springing up
amidst the burnt stubble of the 46 dambo,” wet
with dew. Presently the shafts of light dissipate
before the flush of the whole sky, the first blush
of the rising sun. Now the huge seed-vessels of
the kigelia trees stand out boldly against the
fast-brightening background, the bushes throw
off their phantom-like shrouds, and there beyond
them is a great herd of roan antelope peacefully
grazing the tender blades of green, slowly wend¬
ing their way down to the little river to drink
their fill before the sun is high and they retire
to the friendly shade and cover of the bush.
In the yet dim light their salmon-tinted coats
look half white, half delicate pink; but presently
the horns of an old bull are clearly distinguishable
as he raises his stately, maned neck and, ever
suspicious of the light of day, turns his black-
and-white muzzle round sharply and gazes for
the first time that day on his enemy, man.
Whether it be that the eyes of wild game are
of poor value to them in the dim light of dawn,
or whether the night has lulled them into some
sense of security (unless, indeed, the prowling,
hungry lion has made their darkness a night of
terror), I do not know, but the fact remains that at
early dawn it is often a matter of ease to approach
a herd of buck in the open so closely and so
openly that one wonders whether some strange
paralysis has not come over them.
Presently the old bull roan snorts loudly and
sharply, and then he raises a foreleg and stamps
the ground, actions born of curiosity and fear,
combined with, perhaps, in the case of the sable
and roan antelopes, a certain mingling of anger.
Suddenly he wheels round and moves off at a
BUFFALO HUNTING IN NORTH-WESTERN
RHODESIA. A FINE BULL
[To face p. 30
A PUKU SHOT NEAR THE GREAT LUKANGA SWAMP

sharp gallop. With him tear the other bulls,

the cows and the little members of the herd, but
only for a hundred yards or so, for presently the
whole troop turn round again and curiously
gaze at the breakers of their morning peace.
The whole sky is now flooded in glory. Away
on the edge of the bush a number of ungainly
Lichtenstein’s hartebeeste are feeding, and
between them and the roan are a few sable
antelope cows. The old sable bull you will now
see is running with the roan; a few minutes
earlier the light was not sufficient to enable one
to determine his handsome black form and great,
sweeping horns. Brighter and brighter becomes
the sky, the “ dambo ” takes on its life of day,
birds of few notes fly and twit across the little
river, the buck all approach the fringe of the bush,
the sun peeps over the tops of the forest land to
gaze once more on the fair picture of Africa,
natural and wild as she has ever been, unsullied
by the taint of civilized man; another day has
come to bathe earth and sky and plain and
forest in the rich glow of the African sun.
The heirs to Nature’s wonders are those who
wander with her through the wilds. To my mind
such a scene as I have attempted to describe in
the foregoing is worth all the masterpieces of
drama and opera performed in all the great
theatres of Europe. All the world’s a stage,
’tis said. Nature’s scenery was painted by God,
staged on the magnificent scale of Creation before
puny man belittled the glory of the effort, and
there are no actors on the stage of Nature.
They are the real exponents of unaffected life
without its rehearsals, without the narrow wings
of modern life or the cruel, glaring footlights of
the up-to-date world.
3
After hunting the buffaloes I wandered away
to the south-west, to the Lukanga and towards
the Copper Mines. North-western Rhodesia has
pretensions to being a mining country, and here
one may come across the prospector—another
human anachronism with the fever microbes
of Wanderlust in his blood.
This is a type of man who flees from the never-
ceasing advance of civilization as the gull flies
from the oncoming blast of an Atlantic gale.
You will find him driven away into the nooks
and crannies of this callous earth of ours, always
hopeful, though seared with the furrows of
privation, always chasing the phantom of a
golden reef, which should he find it will lure him
back to the paths of his fellow-men for a while,
and will rend and tear him and drive him back
to his lonely byway.
Perhaps you will pity him his lot. You
may forget that so soon as his hands are closed
on the will-o’-the-wisp which he has spent the
best years of his life in following across the
marshes of sickness, poverty, and solitude, just
so soon will the gold lose its glamour. He will
wander away to some great, greedy city, whose
people are lustful of his gold, but who never
dare to cross the mountains and delve for it in
the hard, relentless quartz, or to wash out the
yellow grains from the dry, burning sand of some
waterless African “ river.” If you will follow
the fortunes of the man, you will see him one day
scowling a glad farewell to the happy idol of
his hardest days. He will resolutely turn his
back on the bars and the music-halls and the
twinkling lights of what the world calls pleasure.
A few weeks later, and he is once more toiling
under the burning rays of the sun, digging little
pits, constructing a primitive windlass out of
bush timber, and with the help of a few rude
savages making for himself the unlovely begin¬
nings of a Central African home. A few bundles
of sticks, a quantity of rank grass stalks, and some
mud from a half-dried-up water-hole are all he
needs for a house, which in his heart of hearts
he prefers to the gilded palaces of the mighty.
The furniture—if it might so be called—is well
in keeping with the simple barbarity of the walls
and the covering which must, during the rainy
months, protect him from tropical downpours
and barely endurable heat. A couple of dynamite
boxes, a broken-down stretcher bed, a few skins,
a rough table made out of a packing-case, a
few plates and pans and a rifle—these are all
the possessions of this man, a true type of the
pioneers of industry, who so often go down into
a little grave dug by some faithful native,
unhonoured and unknown.
A few miles north of his camp there may lie
a range of rugged hills, their rocky pinnacles
unadorned by bush or tree. Evening after
evening the prospector will sit on one of his
dynamite boxes and watch the smoke from his
pipe waft gently away towards their frowning
crests, and evening after evening as the sun dies
in that crimson glory, which only those who
live with Nature can really learn to love and
look for, he will ponder on the untold possi¬
bilities of the lands beyond, where the noises of
the pick and the shovel and the dynamite
cartridge have never been heard.
In the course of a little while that pondering
will change into a yearning to know what a
journey over the rugged range may bring forth.
Each evening the yearning will become more
intense, and there will soon arrive a day when

the camp will be deserted, and the prospector
will be eagerly trudging up the bush-clad slopes
of the mountains, his senses quickened by the
thought that by midday he will have scaled the
barrier to its summit, and will see below him
that land which is to make his fortune and repay
him for his years of toil and hardship. At last
the crest is reached, and there, rolling away in
a boundless wealth of forest and plain, is what
his eyes have longed to see for many, many days
of discontent.
Once again this man, who cannot live within
the narrow confines of orthodox life, builds
himself a resting-place; once again a range of
hills thrusts itself on his nomadic mind.
There is no word in the English language which
adequately expresses this all-absorbing passion
for knowledge of what lies on 44 the other side.”
The Germans call it Wanderlust, and should you
roam much over the vast continent of Africa,
you will find that many are smitten with this
limitless fascination. Men have been known to
tramp across a waterless desert with the agonies
of fever racking every nerve and limb in an
attempt to still this subtle spirit. But it is
never stilled, and, so long as the world has
unknown spaces, it will survive and continue to
lure on men until their final journeys are com¬
pleted, and they die with a mountain mocking
them in their last moments, or the final dawn
stealing across some great plain which they have
striven hard to traverse. Perhaps it is well that
the world should have such men. When great
industries arise in places reclaimed from the
desert, and high stacks belch forth their smoke
over the lands where the prospector toiled in his
colonel carden’s barotse police boys, broken hill
[To facep. 34
ONE OF THE MINERALIZED KOPJES AT
BROKEN HILL, RHODESIA
solitude, the name of the man who washed 44 pay

dirt ” in that one-time region of desolation on
which a great city has reared up its stone temples,
will be remembered by few. The citizens who
feed themselves with golden spoons and clothe
themselves in gorgeous raiment, where the
pioneer cooked a guinea-fowl over a camp-fire
or made himself a shirt out of the remnants of a
torn tent, will have forgotten the name of the
first man in that land. One can almost imagine
the restless spirit rising in a shallow-dug grave,
one can almost hear the dream talk of the poor
unhonoured prospector in those splendid words
of Kipling—
44 Well I know who’ll take the credit—
All the clever chaps that followed—
Came, a dozen men together—
Never knew my desert fears,
Tracked me by the camps I’d quitted,
Used the waterholes I’d hollowed;
They’ll go back and do the talking;
They’ll be called the pioneers ! ”
CHAPTER III
MASHONALAND : FROM SALISBURY TO THE

PORTUGUESE FRONTIER
There are no records of Job having journeyed

with pack-donkeys. Had he done so his repu¬
tation for amazing patience would assuredly have
suffered.
When L. and I travelled from Salisbury to
Tete, with Molo, Dodo and Clo Clo5 we ran up
a big account in that celestial ledger wherein
swear-words and curses are entered. We shall
be tempted to dispute those accounts in the
eventful day, when they are presented for settle¬
ment. They should have been charged to Molo,
Dodo and Clo Clo. It should here be explained
that we were not eloping with the female section
of a theatrical company. Molo, Dodo and Clo
Clo were three donkey mares, for which we paid
£7 10s. apiece. We were bound for the far-
distant interior after elephants and adventures,
and as we could not get porters we purchased the
three donkeys.
We wandered off the beaten track, tramped
and struggled along paths which were practically
untrodden by white feet, toiled over mountains,
and forded angry rivers. It was hard work from
daylight to sundown, and we had but very little
shooting. L., however, proved himself a mag¬
nificent companion, and when at last we reached
that old-world town slumbering by the Zambesi,
36
MASHONALAND 37
which is named Tete, we looked back over the
noble Luenya, the tumbling Mazoe and the
distant hills of Molimbwe with genuine sighs of
regret.
One glorious morning in June of 1909 every¬
thing was at last ready for a start. We had
arrived in Salisbury with two Portuguese
“ boys,5’ two pointers, a greyhound, rifles, ammu¬
nition, ropes, a small tent, boxes of provisions,
blankets, and sundry other impedimenta. At
first we were mistaken for a circus—not altogether
an unreasonable assumption.
On that morning when we commenced pack¬
ing, a small crowd assembled in one of the side
streets off Manica Road to witness our departure.
They were rewarded by seeing Molo bolt with
her pack, which had been tied on to the wooden
slats of her saddle by an amazing number of
ropes and knots and straps and girths. Her
fastenings would well-nigh have broken the heart
of Prometheus, but, despite them all, she dashed
off into the street. My valued Westley-Richards
12-bore, in its new case, slipped down between
her legs. A load of provisions twisted around,
and a roll of blankets draped her in terror. She
turned a complete somersault, and I felt sure she
had broken her neck. A group of small boys
laughed. We rescued Molo from the treasured
debris and tried again. Dodo next endeavoured
to end her asinine life by doing likewise with
her loads, and then Clo Clo, despite such per¬
suasive things as sjamboks and ropes, refused to
budge. Truly our peregrinations were starting
under an unpromising augury ! Eventually we
persuaded the three animals to move slowly
along. Tom and Sam, the two natives, also
carried loads, and as we were short-handed, L.
and I had to shoulder rifles and drive the donkeys.
Clo Clo proceeded at the rate of about a mile an
hour, and that night we had to pitch camp at
Hope’s Farm—only about five miles from Salis¬
bury. The next day I returned to town, ex¬
changed Clo Clo for Clo Clo II, bought a few
necessary odds and ends and a bottle of “ dop,”
and at length, after scouring Salisbury, secured
a smart little Angoni named Julius, who said he
was prepared to share our lot at 10$. per month.
The next morning we started from Hope’s
Farm, having destroyed the wooden pack-saddles
and used them for firewood. They were most
useless things, and for the rest of the long journey
we resorted to balancing the loads, a matter of
very considerable difficulty. We generally com¬
menced to pack as soon as it was light, and it
always took at least half-an-hour to make the
loads 46 sit ” properly. Often and often one
donkey would barge into another before we had
gone a couple of hundred yards. Over would
come the pack, and we would gaze in dismay
at a bundle of cartridges, cooking-pots, and
precious tins of meat rolling down a deep ravine
or bouncing along to a river. It was indeed
heart-breaking.
The morning we left Hope’s Farm we had a
slight adventure with a mamba. Taffy, Ginger
and Tinker, in their madness, rushed in on the
deadly reptile, but I managed to blow his head
off with a charge of shot before any damage was
done to the dogs. Early in the afternoon we
stood on the southern ridge of the Chisawasha
Valley, and gazed across to where the purple
hills of Abercorn stood as sentinels in the azure
dome of the sky. Below us the red-brick build¬
ings of the Mission Station, surrounded by
ONE OP OUR DONKEYS CROSSING THE INYAGUI RIVER
* !
MASHONALAND 39
fruitful green gardens, told of an outpost of God.
To Chisawasha many a foot-sore wanderer has
come, and the good Fathers have laid him on a
restful bed. They have given the thirsty drink,
the hungry food, and the sick medicine. There
they mould the native mind. They build wagons
and houses and cultivate orchards and crops, and
if you have any knowledge of the Bantu you will
applaud their doctrine. For the dignity of
Labour is a far better thing to teach the children
of Africa than the dignity of Christ.
At dusk we camped by a little laughing
rivulet, and tethered the donkeys up in a de¬
serted kraal. The majesty of the dying sun
threw shafts of gold and fire across the western
sky, and as we ate our frugal meal a great peace
and contentment came over us—-the peace of the
untrammelled byways where the noise and bustle
of the throng are not, where the lullaby of the
river laughs one to sleep, and the glory of the
dawn is the waking harbinger of that freedom
which only the waste spaces of this onward world
can know. We marched through m’hoba-hoba
trees, and penetrated what is now the Arcturus
district, and an important mining centre. But
at that time there was only a meagre amount of
prospecting going on in the region, and it was
wild, little-traversed country. I shot a part¬
ridge for the pot, and at night we outspanned
at the M’Fen River, a pretty stream which, in
common with the other rivers of this neighbour¬
hood, flows north to meet the Mazoe, which, in
turn, joins the Luenya* and empties into the
Zambesi a few miles below sleepy, slumbering
Tete. The next river we forded was the Inyagui,
where there is a picturesque little Mashona kraal,
* Or te Rueriya.”
and the usual howling mob of venomous pariah
dogs—yellow mongrels with ears pricked like
jackals. L. had a hard struggle to march that
day, as he had a touch of fever, but eventually
we forded the Inyagui and camped on the other
side. There are golden grains of hard-learned
wisdom in those last four words. “ To camp on
the other side ” is, in fact, one of the first and
most important things to learn in the alphabet
of African travel. Nature works with fevered
pulses in this continent, and once the Rubicon
has been crossed one can afford to smile at the
torrents of the night’s storm. There was, I
remember, a rather curious contrivance in use
at the Inyagui to enable travellers to wend their
troubled ways when the river was in flood. Two
staunch trees, one on either bank, were con¬
nected by a wire rope. From this was swung a
66 cage ” composed of timber and reeds, which
was hauled from side to side as required by
natives. It was rather a grotesque and un¬
reliable sort of ferry, yet it served its purpose in
a crude and terrifying way.
We were now well within the true borders of
the Mashona country. Kraals galore we passed
through, all teeming with life—men, women—
round-bellied 44 umfaans,” mongrel dogs, noisy
goats, fleas and other insects of prey, all en¬
veloped in a memorable matrix of filth and smell.
The most ardent admirer of the great64 M’Shona ”
or 44 M’Swina ” race could scarcely accuse them
of being cleanly. They put stones in tree-forks
at dusk to appease evil spirits. They recognize
in some vague and nebulous way a Deity. By a
considerable stretch of the imagination they
might perhaps be termed “Godly,” but not all
the powers of fiction in this world could suggest
MASHONALAND 41
that the M’Swina are cleanly. In many ways
true native Mashonaland has much of topsy-
turveydom about it. A flowing stream, for
instance, is in most parts of Africa, and, for
that matter, of the world, deemed in some way
an emblem of purity. At any rate one would
imbibe of the running water rather than of the
stagnant. But in native Mashonaland the wise
take their fill from pools and little backwashes.
It is a custom among the M’Swina to bury their
dead in or by running water, and they pollute
the flowing, tumbling rivers with which so much
of their country is beautifully and bountifully
endowed in various other ways. Wherefore,
should you ever wander among the M’Swina,
beware of the brooklet. Look for an evil¬
smelling morass or a puddle, remnant of last
season’s rains.
Nowadays I never set eyes on an egg unless
my mind wanders back to that memorable journey
from Salisbury into the interior. We had eggs
for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner; eggs
boiled, eggs fried, eggs cooked in some wonderful
manner, known only to Julius, and eggs ome-
letted. On one occasion on our journey to Tete
we devoured no less than thirty-two eggs between
us for dinner, and we felt that we could never
look a self-respecting sort of hen in the face again!
The day we left the Inyagui L. had that curse
of Africa, malaria, rather badly, and he had to
struggle along and look with longing eyes for
the next camp. At the Tshanoia River we
halted during the heat of the day. L. “ took it
easy,” whilst I wandered off to the native village,
and surveyed the M’Swina in all their domestic
happiness.
At the back of the kraal a great tortoise-
shaped rock, seared and furrowed by the rains
of countless centuries, towered up. All over
this part of Mashonaland huge granite masses,
enormous as half the abbeys and cathedrals of
England built into one, are scattered like colossal
marbles, that the gods had tired of and hurled
in their weariness away from them. Some were
ill-shaped and resembled nothing save “ tors,”
or “cairns,” others took on vague likenesses to
churches and lighthouses. All, according to
native superstition, were the abode of evil spirits,
gnomes of wicked impulse, and earth-bound
ancestors. But despite such gruesome repu¬
tations the M’Swina huddled around these rock
masses in thousands. In the forests surrounding
their bases they found weird shells which were
worn round the necks of the youngsters as love
charms, and were greatly treasured. The soil
round the bases of these granite giants was good
and kindly, and so the natives tilled their crops
and lived that life of happy idleness which is
their heritage.
On the road we met scores of blacks bound
for the mines, escorted by tall, athletic-looking
“ boys ” who bore the letters R.N.L.B. (Rhode¬
sian Native Labour Bureau) on their blue jerseys.
Once we met a bronzed native labour recruiter
and his wife returning to civilization after a
sojourn in the wilds in the interests of the golden
holes of the South.
This human driving power that whirls the
wheels of the great industries was drafted from
the various corners of South Central Africa—
from “ M’Pezeni ” (Fort Jameson), from N’Ungwe
(which is the native name for Tete), from the hot,
sweltering banks of the Zambesi, and from the
cool highlands of Angonia. They were marching
A TYPICAL MASHONA FAMILY; TSHANOIA RIVER
MASHONALAND 43
to “ Harari ” (Salisbury), and as they passed our
little caravan they shouted a cheery salute to the
loquacious Julius or the more solemn faces of
Tom and Sam. Stream after stream we crossed
—all hurrying to join the great Mazoe—and then
at last one dull and clouded afternoon we reached
M’Rewas, a small native Commissioner’s and
police post, about sixty miles from Salisbury.
We passed a little, open cemetery, and as we
took our broad-brimmed hats off, we read the
names of men who had helped to mould Eastern
Rhodesia, and had left their bones in the country’s
keeping. We halted for a few minutes at the
B.S.A.P.* post, and admired one of the finest
koodoo heads I have ever set eyes on. Its stately
owner had been pulled down by a lion. Half a
mile beyond the police post we pitched camp.
L., who had pluckily plodded along in the grip
of the malarial fiend for the two previous days,
took to his blankets, and I wandered away to
the local store to purchase a few supplies. High
up on a kopje I found the merchant of M’Rewas,
clad in flannels and a public-school blazer. He
gave me tea, and after we had talked of lions
and leopards, I bought a few tins of meat, fish
and milk. The gentleman storekeeper offered
to show me a short cut to camp, saying that he
wished to pay a call en route. I followed him,
and presently on the side of the kopje we came
to a thorn “ scherm,” or fence. Inside there
was a man unshaven and unshorn sitting on a
soap-box in the centre of his barricade.
Not until some time after did I find out a little
of his history, and ascertain the whys and where¬
fores of his lonely entrenchment. He was a
well-known man on the Rand a few years back,
* British South Africa Police.
and until he died, a few months ago, was quite
a character in Rhodesia. I learned in Tete of
an English senhor who had “taken over5’ the
local hotel for a week and made the Aveneida
de Freria d’Andrade run red in vino tinto and
yellow in the baser spirits. Only after he left
did the proprietor find out that the merry fellow
was not a millionaire after all! The law com¬
pelled him to lie low for a while, and the M’Rewas
Kopje was his sanctuary. M’Rewas is fairly
high, and that night we were glad to pile all
our available blankets on our beds. Poor L.
shivered and chattered through the night, and
our little band of retainers huddled around a big
fire. The three donkeys, Molo, Dodo and Clo
Clo, were tethered up close to the tent, as there
were lions prowling around, and we could not
afford to take risks with our transport. The
next day, Sunday, we 66 slacked it ” in camp,
cleaned guns, and got ready for the journey to
M’Tokos—forty miles distant. It is curious how
thoroughly one realizes the excellence of the
Fourth Commandment when away in the wilds,
far from all such civilized things as church bells,
calendars and daily papers. Many and many a
time when off the beaten track, not knowing the
day of the week or the day of the month, scarcely,
indeed, knowing the month, has a longing for a
day’s rest come over me. The most exciting
native tales of elephants with tusks as long as
crocodiles close to camp have not drawn me from
my blankets. Later on I have calculated and
consulted at length my diary. Invariably
Sunday ! Man has grown to feel the need of
the seventh day, and whether he is in Kensington
or the Congo he hears the slothful voice of the
Sabbath telling him to rest. During the dark
MASHONALAND 45
days of the French Revolution every tenth day
was appointed a day of rest and amusement ;
but neither man nor beast could stand the strain
of ten days’ work. The failure of this experi¬
ment was noteworthy proof of the comparative
littleness of man’s wisdom. But I digress.
Monday found L. much better, so we said “ good¬
bye ” to M’Rewas and struck off towards the
north-east.
It is not advisable to lose one’s temper on a
donkey. It is far less advisable to hit one of
these provoking animals with a valuable gun.
The morning we left M’Rewas, Clo Clo maddened
me into a sort of Balaam-like wrath by abso¬
lutely refusing to keep up with her consorts. I
gave her an angry prod with the heel of my
Westley-Richards hammerless 12-bore. The
stock broke. I choked with curses, and Clo Clo
turned around and smiled on me sweetly.
We had another catastrophe that morning.
One of the animals played the giddy goat whilst
fording a small stream, and her loads fell into
the water. This greatly amused a B.S.A. police¬
man, who was escorting the Chief Native Com¬
missioner on a tour of inspection. L. and I
failed to see the humour of the situation.
On the morrow we reached the Inyaderi River
at midday after a long and tiring trek. The
Inyaderi is a pretty stream, and one of the largest
of the many tributaries of the Mazoe. On
its banks we found some “ Government rest-
houses,” in reality grass and reed-built huts.
Here we pitched camp, and went out shooting in
the afternoon. There was a fair amount of buck
spoor around, but a solitary hare constituted the
bag.
The loads sat well the next day, and we made
fair progress. In the afternoon we reached an
eminence—a Lilliputian plateau, in fact—and a
wonderful view stretched out before us. It was
truly magnificent. Away to the north the hills
of Mount Darwin cut the horizon like the teeth
of an immense saw. Between us and them lay
the country of the M’Bushla, a tribe of murderous
thieves and liars. Southwards, hill after hill,
valley after valley rolled away through the
beautiful Inyanga country to TJmtali and the
Portuguese frontier. Behind us lay the giant
kopje at M’Rewas. Ahead the granite mass of
M’Tokos, which, according to native superstition,
was hurled from Umtali, loomed up immense and
impressive.
We slept that night in an 46 umsasa ” or
“ scherm,” and the next morning marched into
M’Tokos. Molo, the best of the three donkeys,
had a sore back, and we had to distribute her
load between Clo Clo and the three natives and
ourselves, so that it was a weary little caravan
that eventually came to a halt in front of Massey’s
store.
M’Tokos is a British South African Police Post
situated in the heart of a great, granite-boulder-
strewn country. It is high, wild land in the
centre of that stretch of Eastern Mashonaland,
peopled by the M’Tokos, a minor tribe or off¬
shoot of the great M’Swina race. The M’Tokos
took no part in the Rebellion, and, as some sort
of a reward, certain of their chiefs are entitled
to carry fire-arms. At Massey’s store we met
B., who at one time held an important official
position in the Transvaal Government service.
B. died, poor fellow, in the Rhodesian byways a
few months ago. He was of one of the most
noble and famous families of England, and he
MASHONALAND 47
was wholly out of his element selling tins of bully
beef behind the counters of a trading station.
Here, too, we met a sallow-faced white man
who had come down from the far interior, and
a rather unprepossessing-looking 44 prospector.”
The traveller had been very ill, and had little to
say for himself, but the prospector gentleman kept
up a running fire of babble. Said he to B.,
44 TTllo, old stiff! I’m sure I’ve met you before.
Down in the south, I reckon.” Said B. in
his quiet way, 64 Highly probable. I was once
Governor of the Pretoria gaol.” The digger
lapsed into a pleasing silence after that.
As Molo, the leading donkey, was unfit for
duty, we visited the Native Commissioner’s office
and prayed him to secure us four porters. We
lunched with B., and, to our great delight, four
stalwart M’Tokos arrived early in the afternoon.
Their leader and spokesman was a regular old
Uncle-Tom-looking sort of native, not without
certain markedly simian characteristics about his
features and limbs. He was a cheerful, willing
old savage, full of anecdote and jest. L. and I
named him the 46 Bo’sun,” and we said 44 good¬
bye ” to him with keen regret a week or two
later. These M’Tokos agreed to carry loads for
us to the Portuguese border, so in the afternoon
we set off—L. and I, seven natives, and three
donkeys. Great, precipitous granite cliffs towered
high all round us, and at night we camped in a
native village, where a number of Portuguese
boys, going through to Salisbury, were resting.
The 44 Bo’sun ” very cleverly bound up the
stock of my broken shot-gun with wire, and
the next morning I shot a brace of guinea-
fowl in some old native gardens. Julius, the
resourceful, cooked them in admirable style.
4
That afternoon we passed through particu¬
larly wild country. Enormous rock masses
frowned down on us. Here and there we had
dense thorn and bush belts to penetrate, and
we noticed baobab trees—immense vegetable
monsters which seem to favour unkindly soil-
growing in fair profusion.
My diary records that on the night of June 18,
Tom and Sam bolted. These two boys we had
brought all the way from Gatooma, and L. and
I heaped many curses on their heads. Julius,
the little Angoni I had recruited in Salisbury,
remained faithful to us, and he, indeed, went
right up to Lake Bangweolo, and proved himself
a most admirable 44 boy.” The situation, however,
was critical. Molo’s back was so sore she scarcely
could be touched. The four recently engaged
M’Tokos were affected by the disappearance of
the two scoundrels, and wanted to return. We
were in a wild and uninhabited part of the
country, so the outlook was far from promising.
But at last our counsels and the logic of the
66 Bo’sun ” prevailed. We redistributed loads
all round, and the heavily-loaded little caravan
moved onwards. The four M’Toko boys, after a
good deal of discussion, agreed to come on with
us to Tete, and, as if to cheer them forward, we
ascended some great diorite hills, from the top
of which we could see, stretching away on the
horizon, all purple and indistinct in the distance,
the Molimbwe Mountains on the Portuguese
frontier. It was a magnificent view that our
eyes gazed on. In the foreground was the great
rugged hill of Masoka, and below us lay crag after
crag, jagged masses of granite, bush and mountain
rill.
The “ Bo’sun ” told us that down there, some-
MASHONALAND 49
where amidst this wild jumble of Nature’s, we
should find a village, and that our only way to
the border lay past it. So we began to descend,
and a terrible descent it was, too. Before long
loads began to roll off, and the donkeys were
sliding and tumbling down the sides of giant
rocks as steep as the sides of houses. In places
the animals had literally to be dragged down,
and we had to carry the loads ourselves. It
was a long and tiring task, but at length we espied
a cluster of huts far away down below us. Late
in the afternoon we reached this kraal, known
as Chafiga’s, and certainly one of the most
picturesque native villages I have ever set eyes
on. To the north-west the great wall of granite
that we had clambered down soared upwards
with crests all castellated and forbidding. At
the foot of the wall a little stream coursed past
trees all gold and brown with the glory of their
winter garments. And then came the clearing
in which the people of Chafiga’s lived their life
of lazy luxury. They had crops and grass roofs,
and good water in abundance, and what more
does the African native desire? Yet it is for
these happy children of savagery that they rave
for funds in the pulpits of England, what time
the Thames Embankment and the East End are
crying out for bread and a stitch of clothing !
We pitched camp on beyond the village. A
woman was crying for her dead child on the
threshold of a hut, and far into the night her
wails made pitiful music. My night’s slumbers
were further disturbed by one of the donkeys
nibbling at my blankets in the darkness. An
owl, too, hooted mournfully from the kopjes
behind our little tent. The “ Bo’sun ” gravely
informed me that it was an 64 m’zeze,” or evil
spirit, and that the kopjes all around were
haunted by ghosts and wraiths. The “ Bo’sun 55
also informed us that we were getting into
country where water was very scarce, and that
we should all be very thirsty before the next
nightfall.
The old man was quite right. Up to Chafiga’s
we had little or no trouble with water; indeed,
we often remarked on the generous manner in
which Nature had endowed Eastern Mashonaland
with rivers. But the day after we left that
picturesque village water troubles began. At
first we had some more stiff climbing through
rugged gorges to do. Here baboons sat on the
gaunt rocks and gruffly barked at us as we
passed. We met some native monkey-catchers
with big nets. They informed us that “ n’ysmia-
zaan 55 (wild game) was scarce, and that they
were out on a food-hunting expedition. In East
Africa I had met a N’Dorobo who professed to
be fond of lion meat, but I had never before
heard of natives eating monkeys ! This fact is
interesting, as showing how low the African
native will prostrate himself before the shrine
of meat. Shortly after meeting the baboon-
hunters a heated argument arose among our
natives as to the route we should take. The
M’Tokos protested that if we went the path
Julius advocated we should die of thirst. Julius
replied that the road advised by the M’Tokos
meant parched throats and a terrible and linger¬
ing death; a truly pleasing prospect altogether !
Whose counsels prevailed I know not, but at
length some route or other was agreed on, and
L. and I marched on, it must be confessed, not
without a considerable amount of anxiety. We
reached a small village at mid-day, and the
prospector’s camp; mashonaland
MASHONALAND 51
inhabitants fled in terror. Why, I know not.

Africa is full of fears and tremblings and foes and
marauders, and these people no doubt thought we
had come on a raiding expedition.
In the afternoon we marched over some
likely-looking quartz outcrops, and as night
began to fall we reached the dried-up bed of
the Wezi. We were all fearfully thirsty, but
there was not a drop of water in sight. My heart
sank within me, but presently one of the M’Tokos
dug a deep pit in the bed of that disappointing
stream, and a little black evil-smelling liquid
welled up. It was all we had, but that indeed
tasted as nectar. The next day I shot a brace of
guinea-fowl, and in the evening we reached a
pretty kraal near the Mudzi, a river which in the
rains is a fast-flowing stream, but at the time of
our crossing it was well-nigh dried up. Foot-sore
and weary, we turned in, and the next morning
set off to reach the Portuguese frontier. About
mid-day we crossed a big open clearing in the
bush. Away to our left a big boundary com¬
mission pole stood up like a dead tree, and we
knew that we were at last out of British territory
and had entered Portuguese East Africa.
CHAPTER IV
PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA: TO THE CITY OF

SIESTAS AND BEYOND
As though to let us know that we had at last

passed through Chartered territory, the whole
country seemed to take on a different aspect.
The vegetation became more luxuriant, buck
and birds were more plentiful, and instead of
the arid bush and dried-up streams of extreme
Eastern Mashonaland we got glimpses of rivulets
rushing through a wealth of verdure. Even the
natives seemed to have changed. They were
more hospitable, more interested and more
interesting. Instead of a stubborn diffidence,
they put on faces of welcome and saluted with
prettily pronounced “senhors.” It was indeed
as though, when we crossed that line of bush
clearing denoting the frontier, we had stepped
into a new world peopled with pleasantly differ¬
ent tribes, and with Mother Earth robed in a
new and far more beautiful garment.
The first Portuguese East African kraal we
camped at was Chipanes, and here close to the
village we discovered some magnificent mahogany
bean trees. They are pretty little things, these
red and black vegetable curios, and we gathered
some handfuls of them. At the next village we
purchased a few curiously shaped battle-axes and
knives from the natives after a great deal of
bartering. We were also pressed to buy a
52
PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA 53
captive owl, but as we had no earthly use for

the uncanny bird, we refrained from parting
with further supplies of 46 limbo55 or calico.
The African native is at heart a great bargain
driver, and it was amusing to watch the people
at the villages feel and inspect the calico, measure
the stretches of cloth we offered, and then look
with careful and comparing eyes at the knives
or spears or axes they wished to dispose of.
The same process of lengthy consideration, accom¬
panied by a great deal of haggling, always took
place over eggs and mealie meal, which we had
to purchase for our own natives. Sometimes
money was asked for instead of calico, and if a
sixpence was tendered, the village would gather
round and stare at and handle the coin until
satisfied as to its genuineness before the bargain
was struck. Invariably before commerce com¬
menced, generosity was allowed a brief prelude.
A small basket of meal or an egg the size of a
ping-pong ball would be given to us. Of course
something was expected in return, and many a
handful of salt or pinch of tobacco we returned
for these customs. One afternoon, when on the
way to Kapsyiro’s kraal, we had a very hard
and trying climb. At the top of the hill the
rise was crested by huge rocks, and how the
donkeys ever managed to scale them was, now
that I come to look back on the incident, a
veritable miracle. There were also, I remember,
some singularly ferocious thorns growing here¬
abouts. They were truly devilish things, with a
kind of thorn growing within a thorn, and they
gripped clothes and flesh like a fish-hook. At
one of these villages we met a singularly enter¬
taining individual in the person of an Indian
“Rabu,” who was trekking to Salisbury. What
he was, whether scribe or chef or bottle-washer,
I know not, but he had a most remarkable fund
of tales and experiences to draw on, and knew
Africa from the Nile to the Zambesi. He told
us many interesting tales of elephant hunting and
ivory trading, and he was particularly informa¬
tive on the subject of illicit “ elephants5 teeth,55
and the ways and means of transporting them
from Africa to Asia.
At length one morning we reached Shangara,
on the banks of the Ruenya, the largest river
that we had as yet seen. Bush fires had been
burning all over the country-side, and at times
we had literally to pull the donkeys through the
edges of the belts of flame. The air had been
hot and oppressive, and so it was with a feeling
of relief and joy that we at last sighted the noble
waterway of the Ruenya, which, in the rains, is
a strong surging torrent four hundred yards from
bank to bank. But when we reached Shangara
it was in the dry season, and the waters were
divided by a broad spit of clean white sand.
Forests of reeds and rushes garbed the banks,
and altogether the scene was one of refreshing
beauty, such a thing as our eyes had not gazed
on for many a weary day. Shangara once
boasted of a fort and a commandant, but the
natives destroyed the stronghold, and militant
Portugal is now to be found at Musanga, on the
Rhodesian border, at no great distance from the
Kaiser Wilhelm goldfield. But the wooden
skeleton of the old citadel still looks across the
river with a mock defiance. Here wre made our
camp. One or two Banyan traders had estab¬
lished themselves at Shangara, and we managed
to purchase a little sugar and tea from them.
They did a brisk trade with the natives of this
densely populated district in bees’-wax and meal

or 44 oofoo.” The Ruenya contains a certain
amount of alluvial gold, and this is collected by
the natives and sold to the Banyans in quills.
There can be no doubt that many of the natives
of this district pay their hut tax out of gold
which they wash out of the beds of the Ruenya
and Mazoe rivers. One of the Banyan store¬
keepers told us that buck 44 as big as oxes 55 were
plentiful along the river banks, and so we went
out shooting in the afternoon. But the bush
was frightfully dense and thick, and we had to
return to camp and make a dinner of eggs. It
was full moon that night, and as the music of
the night winds came rushing up the river I
stood on the edge of the old parapet. Below me
the river was bathed in splendour, and the moon-
rays on the alternating stretches of snow-white
sand and water made up a scene of exquisite
beauty. We had been tramping hard since we
left Salisbury, and on the Ruenya, or, as it is
called by the natives, the 44 Luenya,55 we felt
like jaded town children at the seaside. There
were no crocodiles to be seen, and the boys
assured us that these loathsome creatures were
very scarce in this river. So we swam and
bathed, and left much of the grime and dust
that we had collected on our journey from
M’Tokos in the noble stream. It seemed like
desecration, but it had to be done.
One lovely morning the little caravan, which
had been strengthened by one or two voluntary
recruits who were trekking to Tete and desired
to travel with us, moved across the alternating
stretches of sand and water. In four or five
days we should see the Zambesi. The glory of
the soft bright air and the beauty of the scene
made us feel singularly light-hearted, and as the
water splashed the donkey’s legs L. sang—
Oh, there’s lots of gold,
So I’ve been told,
On the banks of the Ruenya !
These banks were festooned with lianas,

monkey ropes and trailing creepers. Beneath
our feet there was dense green undergrowth,
and overhead the foliage of giant trees often
met and shut out the brilliant azure of the
sky. Along the river grew bushes, covered with
44 macao ” berries—a species of wild fruit about
the size of a gooseberry and possessing a peculiarly
seductive taste. Here and there were rifts in the
luxury of the vegetation, and then the eye caught
glimpses of the river flowing quietly away to
Massangano and the mother stream that churns
up mud and sand on the edge of the Indian
Ocean. The still, placid waters basked in the
sunshine. Birds of plumage most glorious flitted
like bats in the semi-darkness of the tropic
avenues or burst through the open belts, their
feathers blazing like burnished gold or polished
purple.
There were guinea-fowl here in great numbers.
At dusk they came running down the sandy
stretches of the river in armies. All day long
we could hear their curious, cackling, buzzing
noise, as they either picked up seeds and grain
around old native gardens or perched themselves
on tree-tops and surveyed the landscape. We
depended largely on guinea-fowl for the 44 pot.”
Sometimes we flushed them in our march and
sometimes we shot them from tree-tops. It
sounds very unsporting, but when you are
trekking up into the interior of Africa after
elephant, and belts have to be drawn in tight

on a ravenous appetite, one doesn’t worry about
shooting “ sitters.” And, as a matter of fact,
picking guinea-fowl off their perches on top of
the enormously high trees of the Ruenya is far
from being easy work. One has to crawl through
vegetation, tangled and gnarled and knotted,
and manoeuvre amidst creepers and branches to
get a shot at the wily fowl outlined against a little
patch of blue, high, high up, so high that only
a good choke barrel and a charge of number five
shot, well directed, will bring him down.
Often when returning from these guinea¬
fowling expeditions it was late evening, and the
rest of the caravan, now largely enforced by a
number of local natives, had passed on.
Then it was I learned much of African wisdom.
An African native is never at a loss to follow up
a caravan to which he belongs. He may be miles
behind, but even in the densest bush he will find
his way to the camp-fires of his companions.
At one time I used to marvel greatly at this,
but now I know the methods of direction, the
explanation seems extraordinarily simple. Where
there are several paths crossing one another,
sticks are placed across the wrong tracks or a
line is drawn across them in the ground, thus
denoting that these byways are 44 closed,” or
are not being travelled over. Where natives
leave a main bush thoroughfare and turn off to
reach a hidden village, green leaves are thrown
on the paths taken. In dense forest, trees are
blazed along the line of march. There are many
other silent methods of information employed.
Thus, a mealie cob tied up on a bush outside a
village means that the inhabitants have plenty
of grain, and are prepared to barter for food.
One lovely warm morning—it was again a
Sunday—we decided that as we had been making
excellent progress, we would give ourselves a
treat, and have a real slack holiday. So we put
up our little tent, bathed in the noble river, ate
macao berries, turned the donkeys loose, and
gloried in the knowledge that there was no
distant camp to make for at nightfall.
That afternoon there came to our camp a
type of person who is very rare in poor, poverty-
stricken, heathen Africa—a native beggar. In
fact, this was the only one I have ever seen in
the untrammelled ways of the Dark Continent.
He was attended by a woman, and was quite
blind. As if to compensate him for the loss of
his eyesight, Nature had endowed him with
extraordinarily powerful lungs, and he bawled
and sang and bellowed in a truly indescribable
manner. He had, furthermore, a sort of reed
instrument that made a noise more like a flute
than a penny whistle, and more like bagpipes
than either. Evidently he expected us to ap¬
preciate his music, for after he had made the most
horrible din imaginable, he was led to us and
begged for money. We were much annoyed at
this disturbance of the peace and quiet of that
lovely, lazy day, and refused to give him anything
in consequence. He thereupon retired a few yards
and recommenced his symphonies of discord.
Then again he set up a plaintive, mournful squeal
for alms, and in anger we at last bade him “get
out of it.” The blind beggar and his woman crept
away, but, no doubt as a kind of vengeance, he
kept up his horrible din for long afterwards, and
L. and I were sincerely glad when he went away
to his village chattering and jabbering like an
outraged ape.
Next day we lunched beneath the shade of a

large tree which is known to all the natives on
the Ruenya as N’Tondo Nyam Pondo (the place
where the pound was lost). It is so named be¬
cause some years ago a white man lost a pound
whilst camped beneath it.
With a view to its recovery he got natives from
all the surrounding villages to hunt for the lost
sovereign. One pound, or 4,500 reis, means a
great deal to a Portuguese East African “ boy,”
and that search will be for long remembered. The
memory of the thing is immortalized in the name
of the tree.
At dusk the caravan reached Chambrugas, foot¬
sore and weary. Some little distance from
Chambrugas the Mazoe and the Ruenya join,
and a broad, yet very placid sheet flows Zambesi-
wards to the east.
Chambrugas is indeed one of the most beautiful
spots I have ever seen. The river, so broad, so
still, rests in a setting of emerald verdure, and
the whole scene is strangely reminiscent of those
lovely lakes of Killarney which are the jewels of
Erin.
We crossed the Ruenya at dawn on the backs
of the donkeys, and at night slept in a dried-up
river-bed.
The traffic on the road told us that at last we
were nearing Tete, and next mid-day, from the
hills of Kaliwera, we saw below us the white
buildings of the quaint old-world town of
“ N’Ungwe,” as it is named by the natives.
The Zambesi, dancing with sun spangles, swept
past it, and in the afternoon we marched down the
Aveneida de Freria d?Andrade, a foot-worn, weary
cavalcade.
Tete is no new East African town like Fort
Jameson or Blantyre or Nairobi, a result of
modern settlement consequent on the scramble
for territory in which the Powers indulged in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. It is rather
to be classed with Mozambique or Mombasa, for
the Portuguese have held sway in the Zambesi
Valley for centuries. True, the majority of its
buildings are modern, but there is a background
of antiquity to the place, which harmonizes with
the mighty river flowing quietly by it.
More than four hundred years ago a little
band of venturesome Portuguese navigators
raised the standard of their nation to the glory
of Christ and their temporal monarch at this
spot on the Zambesi, some 320 miles from the
mouth of that mighty waterway. Those were
the days when Portugal and Spain were the
greatest colonizing powers in all Christendom,
when the proud spirits of men like Francisco
Barreto and Vasco Fernandes Homem fought
the good fight against heathen Africa under
conditions so awful, so difficult, that no living
man can conceive what those daring voyagers
underwent. Their deeds left an impress deep
in the sands of history. Mombasa, Mozambique,
Quilimane, and many another stronghold of the
East Coast fell before their matchlocks and
cannon, and their expeditions penetrated deep
into the heart of Africa.
Here and there they founded administrative
posts and forts, and one of these was Tete.
Slumbering old town ! Gone are the glamour
and the glory of your heroic past; gone are
those deeds of daring which won for your nation
Eastern Africa! Conquest has given way to
commerce, you have given yourself up to a
seemingly eternal siesta, and your might has
fallen from you ! Perhaps Tete is entitled to

plead some sort of an excuse, for there is an
atmosphere of dolce far niente about all Zambesia,
which seems to envelop its people, its scenes, its
very trees and birds, in a siesta shroud.
Even the great river, after rushing in a mad,
seething torrent over the rapids of Caroabassa,
wends slowly, sleepily, seaward past Tete, unless
it be that the Zambesi is in full flood and the
pent-up waters in the north tear along to the
Indian Ocean. And when the mother river
hastens past the picturesque little settlement,
Tete looks disdainfully at its energy, for surely
the year is long; might not that bit of driftwood
stay its scurry until to-morrow?
“Yesterday and to-morrow”; those are the
keynotes of this capital of Zambesia.
Yesterday Portugal subdued East Africa; and
to-morrow? Ah, well, quien sabe? The sun
is high in the heavens and there are thousands
of natives who can work !
So thinks the Portuguese official or merchant
as he lounges lazily back in his 44 machilla ” (ham¬
mock), gaudily decked with leopard-skins and a
tasselled awning whereon perhaps his coat-of-
arms is emblazoned.
Down the Aveneida de Freria d’Andrade swing
the 44 machilla ” boys, past the old, low-lying, blue-
stained houses which seem to struggle for exist¬
ence with the more solid, lofty, cool, white build¬
ings which Tete in a moment of wondrous activity
reared up unto itself along the river front.
The lord and master of the 44machilla” indo¬
lently alights and saunters into his house, a figure
celestial almost in the snowy whiteness of his
“ ducks ” and helmet, perhaps to enjoy a cigarette
and a slumber.
Tete is a town of half-castes. In every office,
administrative and commercial, woolly heads and
dark, olive faces peer at or interrogate you.
But what does that matter ? Tete has a
prosperity peculiarly its own, a slumbering,
seductive comfort such as you will only find
where the palm tree grows and the wind is warm
with the breath of the tropics.
Providence seems to guard the place and
guide its laboured, lazy footsteps as carefully
and miraculously as the steps of a drunken
man are guided. There are no sanitary laws in
Tete, yet the town boasts a bill of health which
many cities in South Africa might envy. Around
Tete large numbers of fat, flourishing cattle may
be observed, yet there is nothing for them to
eat—at least, the eye fails to detect any pastur¬
age. The place may well be congratulated on
its good fortune; but I have always noticed that
good luck comes more readily to the easy-going
and irresponsible than to the striving and
strenuous.
The good people of Tete would no doubt be
wroth were any taint of irresponsibility to be
laid at their doors, for have they not a navy to
defend them, an army to uphold their traditions
of glorious memory, a fort to bid defiance to all
foes? In short, have they not all the responsi¬
bilities of a military nation to respect, and have
they not the means of enforcing that respect?
Of forts there are two, the river fortress com¬
manding the Zambesi and the old land fort at
the back of the town. Of the latter it is related
that a young British naval officer, in order to
win a bet, stormed the battlements single-
handed one night, gagged the sentry, spiked the
guns, locked up officers and men, and pitched
GUN-BOAT ON
the ammunition into the bush. He thereupon

burst in on his companions at Correa’s Hotel
and exclaimed with pride, “ Gentlemen, I have
taken Tete ! ”
How old Barreto’s spirit must have raved if
indeed he stood sentinel that night on Kaliwera
Hill !
How are the mighty fallen ! The effeminate
lords of commerce have captured the glorious
life of conquest and battle. Instead of the
thunder of the cannon, the placid purr of the
stern-wheelers breaks the solemn silence of the
Zambesi.
Machinery for the gold-mines of Chifumbaze
is brought up the great waterway instead of
conquerors. Ground-nuts and bees’-wax wend
their way seawards instead of slaves and savage
treasure.
Thus may one’s thoughts turn when the
silvery moon casts a sheen of splendour over the
Zambesi and lights up the spume from the s.s.
SofalcCs stern wheels till it scintillates like a
dancing wave of diamonds on the bosom of the
water.
The snow-white church of the Sacred Heart
stands out from the river banks spectre-like in
the moonlight, and on the quay a throng of
officers, civilians and natives, all arrayed in
white, wave lanterns to the incoming steamer.
After all she is only coming up-river for a
cargo of monkey nuts. How unromantic it
seems! Monkey nuts, indeed ! And when you
fall asleep that night you dream that the decks
of the S ofala are crowded with slaves and that
her hold is full of ivory and gold-dust.
On July 14 we crossed the Zambesi, and as
the white walls and vari-tinted roofs clustering
5
along the river-bank faded into the dim distance,
we set our faces to the north with many regrets
and lingering memories of their lazy hospitality.
The boat-songs of our native servants, as they
pulled and punted, fell soft and musical on the
tropic air.
We reached the north bank near Senhor Bevar’s,
where a large number of boys were gathered, all
laden with graphite, which they had carried
down from Angonia. Right along the great
North Road from Tete to Fort Jameson signs
of commerce and industry are curiously inter¬
mingled with barbarism and savagery. The
road is broad and well preserved. Portuguese
administration has spent thousands of pounds
on its construction and upkeep; for the Portu¬
guese are as insistent about good roads in their
African territory as the Romans were in early
Britain. There is, too, a narrow pathway
running from the Zambesi to the frontier. This
track has been worn smooth by the tramping of
thousands and thousands of feet, and the greater
part of the magnificent highway is never trodden.
There was some very hilly country to be
traversed for our first day or two after leaving
the Zambesi; but our porters stuck well to their
task. These carriers had been recruited for us
by the Companhia da Zambesia. We had been
warned that they might endeavour to bolt, so we
kept a watchful eye on them; but one or two
turned out to be really excellent servants, and
two went right up to Lake Bangweolo with me.
Two days after we had seen the last of the
Zambesi we reached Chiuta, a Portuguese military
post. Chiuta lies in rough, hilly country, and
was commanded by a puny little sergeant pos¬
sessed of tremendous pride in his responsibility.
Was he not the u O.C.5? of a citadel ?—one, mark

you, with wickerwork and timber ramparts and
the pomp of sentry-boxes! When first I saw
this gallant fellow he was standing at the door¬
way of his flimsy residence, holding a small pin-
fire revolver out towards me. I almost mistook
his intentions and nearly covered him; but
presently the little man opened the weapon, and
with a sweet confidence disclosed its emptiness.
It took us a long time to ascertain the why and
wherefore of this strange proceeding, for the
sergeant’s French was even worse than ours.
Eventually, however, we realized that he wished
us to give him a few rounds of ammunition. He
had seen my Harrington-Richardson strapped to
my belt (I was wearing this because of the raw
and strange mob of porters we had with us),
and presumably had imagined that all revolvers
were of the same calibre. I convinced him after
practical trials that my *38 cartridges would not
fit his murderous pop-gun, and after a while he
ceased to worry about this calamity. He was
in terror of a lion that, he told us, prowled
around the hills at the back of the camp. His
pin-fire pistol would have provided a very
desperate means of defence ! We lunched with
this comical little commandant of the Post
Militare e Civil of Chiuta, saw the spoon-shaped
bastinadoes which, when occasion requires, are
used to instil respect for Portugal into the native;
and then we said good-bye55 over a bottle of vino
Unto.
Portuguese East Africa is a hospitable country.
In the most out-of-the-way prazos and posts
the traveller is entertained with a liberality
which shames less remote portions of the globe.
And as to the cost of living, I find it recorded
in my diary that the day after leaving Chiuta we
left the main North Road and travelled a native
path, and that in the evening we purchased
twenty-four eggs, forty-five pounds of mealie-
meal, half a bottle of honey, monkey nuts, beans,
and tomatoes galore for three stretches of limbo,
or calico—equivalent to about one shilling and
sixpence. What a country for the civil service
pensioner ! Guinea-fowl provided us with many
a good meal on the way up, but buck we found
very scarce. At the Chiritzi River a herd of
stately koodoo broke past us, and we saw a few
zebra, but our rifles registered clean misses, and
we had to fall back on the eggs and tomatoes and
a small partridge that I bagged just before dusk.
At the Chiritzi our natives took elaborate pre¬
cautions against lions, dragging thorns and bushes
all round the camp.
The next river we crossed was the MToura,
and then the Loangwa. The following morning
the great rock mass of Mount N’Onza towered
high above us. A few hard marches brought us
to the Luia, a fast-flowing river twenty-five
yards broad in the dry season and about double
this width in the rains. I shot a brace of guinea-
fowl, and then with Julius followed up the
spoor of a water-buck along the banks of the
river.
Here I made the acquaintance of the buffalo
bean—a most diabolical yet harmless-looking
member of the vegetable kingdom which must
have been created with the express purpose of
driving men mad. These beans are covered with
fine, scarcely perceptible spines, which when
liberated settle on one’s flesh and set up the most
maddening irritation conceivable. I quickly
gave up the water-buck spoor, and dashed down
to the Luia. All the crocodiles of the Victoria

Nyanza would not have kept me out of the
water* Even then the irritation did not cease,
and for quite two hours afterwards I was in
torture.
It was almost dark when we left the Luia, and
as neither Julius nor I knew where camp had
been pitched, we wandered along native paths
and yelled and shouted. Night fell, and it
seemed as if we should have to spend a vigil in
the bush. Now and then something crashed
into the dense undergrowth along the edge of
which we were feeling our way-bush-buck in all
probability. My Angoni companion had been
telling me of the fearless way he would act should
a lion cross our path, but when his teeth chattered
with fright at the noise of the buck dashing past
us I did not exactly regard him as a satisfactory
comrade with whom to spend a night in the
forest. I banged off two or three shots in quick
succession, hoping thereby to attract L.?s atten¬
tion and get some idea of the whereabouts of the
camp. There came back a faint answering report
away to the north-east, and eventually I sat
down to a substantial guinea-fowl dinner. Both
on this and on another occasion when I was lost
in the bush of North-Western Rhodesia (for a
much longer period) I walked, as is usual with
those who have lost their way in the bush, in a
circle.
Trekking through Kaponga9s village, I reached
Chifumbaze the next afternoon. L., who had a
touch of malaria, arrived in a “ machilla(ham¬
mock) which I sent back for him the following
morning. Chifumbaze is a Portuguese prazo,
or administrative post, encircled by high hills.
It is a wild country, the centre of a district of
extraordinary interest. Game is fairly plentiful,
and often when returning to the village in the
evening, after a visit to the curious rock in¬
scriptions or paintings which are to be found on
several great granite masses at the foot of the
hills, we heard the coarse gruff bark of koodoo.
Here we were the guests of Mr. Carl Wiese, the
pioneer of this little-known portion of Africa.
Just recently I learned with great regret of his
death in Berlin.
Chifumbaze is the centre of a mining district
of great antiquity, and we visited two or three
mines in the neighbourhood which were being
opened up for Mr. Weise’s company under the
direction of Mr. Louis de Fries. Chief amongst
these was the Maggie’s Luck Mine, where a small
stamp battery had been erected, and where a
rather curious occurrence of gold in granite was
being exploited. Close to the main open-cast
on this property were enormous old underground
galleries dug out by the miners of long, long ago
—no doubt Phoenicians—in their search for the
precious metal. A few miles from Chifumbaze
alluvial gold had been found in the bed of the
Vubwe River, and a number of turbulent spirits
were encamped there. One or two of these were
genuine diggers; others were the flotsam and
jetsam of Africa, who had drifted on strange
currents to a spot where mealie-meal could be
commandeered without much difficulty, and where
there was big game as well as gold to hunt for.
Save in the remote fastnesses of the Congo,
cannibals are generally supposed to be creatures
of an age that has passed away; but just before
we arrived at Chifumbaze a number of men had
been brought in, roped and bound, by inhabitants
of the surrounding kraals, and delivered up to
[ To face p. 6S
NATIVE ARCHER; PORTUGUESE NORTHERN ZAMBESIA
the prazo Administrator with a request that

he would deport them to some land from which
they could never return. These man-eaters, it
was said, were in the habit of robing themselves
in the skins of wild animals, entering huts at night
and carrying away and devouring their own kith
and kin. I saw a photograph of these pleasing
gentry, and their faces were truly those of devils
or savage beasts. It is significant that their
wives and children refused to depart with them.
CHAPTER V
NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA—IN EXILE
North-Eastern Rhodesia is a less-travelled

territory than the sister dependency of North-
Western. It is less accessible, more unhealthy,
and therefore more wild and unexploited. In
1909 L. and I reached its capital, Fort Jameson.
For twenty-three days we had been trudging
along the weary road that leads from sleepy,
old-world Tete to the highlands of Angonia.
Day by day the broad, sun-kissed waters of
the Zambesi had been left farther and farther
behind, and the blue hills of the plateau had
drawn nearer and nearer. We were tired and
foot-sore. One of our little party lay in a
crudely constructed “ machilla,” sick almost
unto death, and we two others tramped and
tramped along the great white road, the only
highway in that world of byways. We pulled
ourselves through the hills, then after we had
crossed a little river we saw Fort Jameson before
us. If you were to ask me which was the
most English-looking place in Africa, I should
answer Fort Jameson. Even to-day, when the
vision of its red-brick bungalows covered with
creepers, its church with the turreted towers
and aged “ West Countrie55 appearance, its
Government House with the park-like grounds
sloping away in front of it, and its broad, peaceful
streets, all hemmed in by the towering hills
draped with bush and shrub, is not so keen as it
70
NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA 71
was when first I fell captive to its charms, I

cannot help associating Fort Jameson with some
village towns where I have lived in Cornwall
and Devon. And when I saw Fort Jameson
that day I thought that the Fal or the Tamar
might lie but the other side of the ridges, and
that a duck-pond was sadly missing in the main
street. There is no village pump in Fort Jameson,
but there is a township well, and though the inn
lacks a signboard and many of the little distinc¬
tions of the English rural tavern, it is wholly
in keeping with the general provincial British
appearance of the place.
Involuntarily one almost expects to observe
villagers in smocks returning begrimed and weary
from the ploughs, and it is when you actually
see the 64 villagers 55 that the idol you have been
worshipping falls to the ground and you awake
to the fact that this, after all, is not England
but Central Africa, that Fort Jameson is the
capital of North-Eastern Rhodesia and not a
West-country village, and that the villagers
have black faces instead of white, and their
smocks are white instead of blue. For the in¬
fluence of the East Coast has imprinted itself
deeply on the native inhabitants of the town,
just as the English minds of the white officials
have given the church, the houses, and the streets
such a look of England. Each has carried with
him the memories of his home-land. The white
man painted them on his dwellings, and the
native has maintained them in his long, flowing
white Swahili robes. Here are aliens to this
civic life. Coal-black Awemba bringing ivory
from the North sit down on the pavement before
the African Lakes Corporation store, waiting
for return loads to Tanganyika. Down the road
pass a score of Awisa from the Luangwa Valley

carrying bales of cotton on their heads. A
white official, flanneled and warm, hurries across
to the Boma, or Government offices, above which
the Union Jack hangs drowsily, now and then
stirred by a faint breeze. A smart khaki-clad
askari (native policeman) hurries across to the
Administrator’s residence—the manor-house of
the village—bent on some official errand.
When the fiery sun sinks behind the Kapata-
moyo hills, and red shafts of its departing glory
pierce the darkening sky, the ceremony of saluting
and hauling down the flag in front of the Boma
is performed with all due pomp and circumstance
by the stalwart blacks of the North-Eastern
Rhodesia Constabulary. The bugles blow out
a blast, and then the fife and drum band plays
44 God save the King.” You uncover your head
and ponder on the might of the Empire and the
strength of that rule which can call forth the hymn
of loyalty to a monarch 6,000 miles away from
his blackest subjects in remotest Central Africa.
Down the main street marches the band, and
as they swing along, the fifes merrily break forth
into one of Harry Lauder’s songs. Rat-tat-tat
go the kettle-drums, and a crowd of natives run
along with the constabulary as children follow
a circus in country England. One great fellow
with a magnificent leopard skin—drum-major
of the band-—attracts your attention immediately.
He thumps the big drum with prodigious strength
and throws out his chest with conscious pride.
Many a dusky glance of admiration and affection
is thrown his way, but mindful only of his duty
he takes no notice of the thick lips parted in a
coquettish smile, or the pearl-white teeth—not
until afterwards, that is.
Night falls over the little town, the largest

outpost of Empire in this part of Africa, and at
the same time one of the smallest capitals of
Greater Britain. Outside Government House,
the Boma and the gaol, the soft tread of the
unshodden askaris falls lightly on the peaceful
evening, and occasionally the silence is broken
by the challenge delivered in very passable
English, 44 Halt! Who go there ? ” and the inevit¬
able (I have written 44 inevitable55 because I
think the reply would be the same even were
you to answer 44 German spy”) 44 Pass, friend;
all well.” A gramophone sends a thrill from
Tosti’s 44 Good-bye ” across the Kapatamoyo
hills, the bugles in the police camp sound 64 Lights
out,” and then all is silence, deep and absolute.
Now and then the peace of night which hangs
over Fort Jameson with that infinite charm,
that soothing, solemn stillness which is never
known in the world’s great throbbing arteries
of life, is broken by the deep, low grunt of a
lion, or the ugly belch of a leopard away in the
wreath of rocky hills. These wild noises of
the night serve to remind one that only a few
years ago M’Pezeni, paramount chief of the
Angoni, ruled with a hand of blood from his
slaughter kraals where now the cluster of brick
houses has been raised in advancement of the
Empire. Maybe the spirit of M’Pezeni haunts
the Kapatamoyo hills, and at night hovers over
the land which once was his, just as M’Zilikazi’s
ghost haunts the Matopos, and, according to
the Matabele, holds 46 indabas ” with the spirit
of Cecil Rhodes, whose mortal body lies beneath
the granite of those rugged hills in the grandest
grave that ever was hewn for man.
Perhaps M’Pezeni’s spirit wails in sorrowful
rage at the little oasis of civilization in a desert
of primeval paganism, a cluster of palms in
the wilderness. For such it is. From the main
street of the little town you may see the kingly
koodoo in the surrounding hills. Yet here is the
pulse of an Administration which rules a territory
nearly 500 miles long and over 300 miles from
east to west. That pulse may beat but slowly,
yet it sends a flow of British justice to far-away
Mweru, even to the waters of Tanganyika.
Those who have to live in Fort Jameson for years
at a time may despise the sleepy monotony of
its ways, enlivened only by a “ ulendo 95 (journey)
to the Luangwa in quest of big game, or the
arrival from England or departure of some
official on leave. But to me there is a distinct
charm about Fort Jameson and its people which
time will not efface from my memory. I think
of it as a primrose growing in the burnt stubble
of the African forests and plains.
Life in Fort Jameson is, of course, vastly
more eventful than in the outlying stations.
Picture to yourself the lonely Native Commissioner
cut off from his kith and kin. Realize his
surroundings. Imagine the utter dreariness of
his existence. As I write there comes vividly
before me a picture of a typical “ Boma 59 on
the fringes of the Awemba country.
Imagine a belt of bushes surrounding a square-
cut clearing, in the centre of which the Union
Jack floats listlessly on the hot, feeble breeze.
Around the square a number of red-brick build¬
ings and wattle-and-daub huts range themselves
against a background of green and bronze
leaves, scattered and stunted bushes, and rocky
little hillocks. In the centre of the square are
four or five well-set-up negroes, clad in khaki,
[To face p, 74
CUTTING UP A HIPPO ; LUANGWA RIVER

with bandoliers around their shoulders and long,

well-cared-for Sniders resting against the flag¬
pole* It is dusk, and the glories of the dying
African sun throw a long blaze of crimson and
gold across the western sky and tinge the bronze
of the mopani trees with a blood-red hue. One of
the khaki-clad figures cries 44 ’Tenshun! ” in a way
which is strangely reminiscent of your old school
sergeant-instructor, another lifts a shining bugle
to his lips, and the remainder gather in the Sniders
to their shoulders and draw up their well-propor¬
tioned bodies with a show of dignity which you
cannot fail to remark on. The sergeant of the
66 askaris,” as our Central African troops and
Constabulary are termed, shouts 44 Pleesent
alms! 55 the bugler blows a fairly creditable
blast, and the sergeant hauls down the Union
Jack, which is reverently folded up and placed
in the mud-covered guard-room for the night.
Such a scene is not uncommon in Central
Africa. Throughout much of the great continent
there are Bomas, or administrative stations,
where we have established outposts of the Empire,
one of the necessary obligations that has fallen
on all nations and all peoples who have assumed
that task of great magnitude which has so aptly
been termed 44 the white man’s burden.”
And yet how few there are who realize what
that burden implies, what strength of character
and moral resolution are required to carry it
with dignity and purpose ! And what does the
average Britisher know of the men who are
carrying that burden for his nation, lifting the
load over obstacles which double its weight,
and when their race is run are quietly and un¬
pretentiously handing on the burden to another ?
Some day Britannia will count up the services
of her unrewarded servants, and she will find
that of these no branch of her labourers has
striven so hard and so honourably as those quiet,
unassuming men who lead their lonely lives in
the remotest corners of Africa.
Cut off from mankind, severed from their
kith and kin, surrounded by a host of savages,
beset by a multitude of troubles and temptations,
the lot of the Central African Native Commissioner
is one which few of their stay-at-home critics
can ever realize.
Let us turn again for a minute to the little
clean-swept square in front of the Boma, where
the flag lazily unfolds itself as the hot breath of
the tropics wafts through the air, day after day
and year after year. The red and white and blue
bring to the resident of those grass-thatched
houses the memory of the Homeland, and act
as an inspiration to him in more than one battle
which it is the lot of all the solitary souls of
Central Africa to fight. He is probably a public-
school man and a product of Oxford or Cambridge,
as you would quickly realize were you to peep
into the privacy of one of those low-eaved rooms.
Photographs of old house and college clubs,
rugger caps and silver cups are keeping company
with rhinoceros horns and leopard skins. There
are neat little bookshelves of novels and a table
littered with Sketches and Fields—ties with the
throbbing life of the Motherland.
Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, next week,
next month are all the same to the subject of
this sketch. There are crimes to be punished,
petty disputes to be settled, the sick to be tended,
the reports to a far-away administrator to be
written. A native chief comes respectfully into
the little office and submits a festered foot for

inspection. The solitary steward anoints and
binds the wound. A woman lays a charge of
theft against another and pleads for justice.
Perhaps it is only a broken calabash* but the
lonely representative of law and right must un¬
weave the tangled meshes of evidence through
many knots of lies in the search for that truth
for which his Mistress stands.
At times he sallies forth into the great forests*
plains and swamps of his division to collect the
taxes which his race demands in return for his
presence. Wild beasts and wild peoples are his
consorts* and when fever seizes him and the
grim wings of death hover perilously near* the
only nurse to lead him along the narrow path
to recovery is a small bottle bearing the symbol
“ quinine.59
But perhaps that ministering influence has
already used up all its ability* and then there is
merely a little grave alongside some native path
to signify that here a white man found his burden
too heavy to carry* and quietly laid it down for
other hands to bear.
If you were to ask his friends and relatives
in the land of his birth where he was or what he
was doing* they would probably reply; 64 Oh,
M! Yes* let me see. He is somewhere
out in Africa doing something or other. To
tell you the truth I can’t quite tell you whether
he is in Rhodesia or Sierra Leone* but it’s some¬
where in that district* you know ! 99 Perhaps
M. comes home one day—no doubt weakened with
sickness* more thoughtful* less communicative
than when his health was toasted at the farewell
dinner* and his old friends told him that he was a
fool to disappear into some unknown country
when he had such an excellent chance of getting
his “ International55 next year. They will be
mystified at his admissions that he did not 64 look
up S. who is stationed at Potchefstroom,” or
“ run down to Cape Town to stay with the T-s
for a week.” They will be still more amazed
when he tells them that he has never been to these
places because they are 2,000 miles away from
his Boma.
Our guardians of the fringes of Greater Britain
are men who have that most relentless enemy
of the solitary to fight in many different forms
and directions. Monotony is that foe, and no
one can realize the sharpness of its weapons
until he has listened for week after week to the
never-ceasing patter of the rain on the African
soil, and has not seen the face of one of his own
people for many dreary months.
There is the demon of insanity lurking behind
the walls of every solitary steward’s habitation.
The morphia fiend knocks at the door of isola¬
tion, and lust, craving, the desire for anything
which will lighten the load of banishment, are
for ever saying, “ We are no parts of your burden.
Put down the heavy weight of dignity and carry
us instead.”
Away in the storm-swept square the red and
the white and the blue, soaked and bedraggled,
are waving around in the wake of a scurrying
whirlwind. Perhaps the bearer of the white
man’s burden will forget that the flag is still
an emblem of nation, although it seems to
have lost some of its sense of calm, unassailed
dignity.
Perhaps he will lay that white man’s burden
on the ground for a while and will rest his
labours in the soothing seduction of one of his
tempters.
Civilization has many ears, and they are always
open; but you may remark that his severest
critics have never carried a heavy load in the
world’s steep places.
If you have realized all the loneliness and mono¬
tony and hardship in the foregoing you will not
be surprised if I lead you a step further, and let
you gaze on another up-country post and another
scene, but in quite another part of Africa, often
the sorry corollary of solitude.
The fiery sun had just sunk below the bronze
belt of Mopani over towards the Great River.
Across the dusky skies bands of crimson and
orange had flung the glories of a Central African
evening, and a few spur-winged geese came
rushing over the river as if they feared their
roosting - place would vanish with the night.
Their phantom-like forms had just disappeared
into the gloaming shadows, when three men
crossed the crude bridge thrown over the stream
and sauntered up the little slope to a long,
low-lying white hut with a capacious “ stoep ”—
the residence of the Boma doctor. He was
the only representative of medicine in a country
as large as England, and the whole attitude and
demeanour of the man gave one the impression
that he realized the immensity of his task, the
futility of the fight he waged against the illi¬
mitable powers of vindictive nature. Tall and
worn, he greeted his guests from the depths
of a cleverly-made native deck chair. No intro¬
ductions were needed as far as they were con¬
cerned, for these four men had for years shared
the common burial of their existences. There
was X., the Native Commissioner, and Y., the
trader and elephant hunter, and Z—well, who Z.
was, not even the doctor or X. or Y. could tell
you.
Presently cigarettes were alight and Medicine,
the host, shouted for his native servants. 44 Well,
you chaps,” he remarked, as he wearily rose in
his chair, 44 what is it to be—4 Black and White 5
or morphia ? ”
44 Morphia,” replied the end of the alphabet,
and morphia they all took.
Maniacs, you will call them, and so they were.
But remember their banishment and the infinite
monotony which was the cause of their madness,
and condemn them not too harshly unless you,
too, have tasted of the fruits of exile.
One day the hand of Y. will falter when the
monarch of all beasts comes tearing through the
forest, his great trunk raised and a badly placed
bullet goading him on to kill the meagre, terrified
thing in front of him. And then, although Y.
has killed his hundred elephants, he will meet
his fate in the most agonized terror conceivable.
The Native Commissioner will be sent home by a
watchful Administration, with our medical friend
to tend him.
As for Z., poor fellow, he has already finished
his last “ulendo,”* for the dread wings of sleep¬
ing sickness fastened on his wasted frame and
carried the driftwood away to another great
ocean, on the unknown waters of which we must
all embark.
I met such an one as Z. in the first place
close to the Luangwa one mid-day when the
sun scorched the very air, and the thermometer
* Ulendo, Chinyanga, lit. a journey.
registered over 112° in the shade. Many lonely

nights had I passed, and many weary miles had
I trudged in silence, my mind one dismal blank.
Unless one has been severed from his own race
for many days, has watched the sun sink over
the tropical forest belts and plains of Central
Africa for night after night, with never a companion
of his own colour to sit by the camp-fire and smoke
the evening pipe, it is impossible to realize the
feeling of excitement and almost delirious joy
experienced when one day a white man, arrayed
in the same ragged garments as yourself, meets
you in some remote corner of the great continent,
and shakes your hand with that grip of true
sincerity which is more often felt in little-trodden
paths than on the highways of civilization.
Under such circumstances strong and ordinarily
unemotional men have been known to embrace
one another. Z. was a quaint figure with his
curiously-trimmed little beard, hair long and
dishevelled and face the colour of parchment.
But he was an even more strange man to talk to.
He rattled away on every conceivable subject,
from the length of rhino horns to the tonnage
of Dreadnoughts, and from Napoleon to Baobab
trees. He carried with him, moreover, a library
which I had little expected to find in an Awisa
village in the Luangwa Valley. Emerson and
Shakespeare and Browning were packed away
with cartridges and tins of jam, and after much
trouble he unearthed for me Milton from the
bottom of a bag of salt. At times his conversa¬
tion wandered in a most bewildering manner.
He would suddenly break off in the middle of a
most interesting discourse on the merits of some
particular rifle, and tell me how he had been
arrested by Belgian officials in the Congo. Yes,
he knew the mysterious Congo, and the gloomy
swamps; he had navigated Tanganyika, and
had indeed been as far north as Mumias on the
old ivory route from Victoria Nyanza to Mount
Elgon and Southern Abyssinia.
After a while he would stop exhausted and run
his fingers through his extraordinarily long hair.
His breath would come in short, sharp gasps, and
I felt at times that I stood very near the last
milestone of his wanderings.
Elephant spoor led me far away from him,
and then we met again at a little administrative
post where two other exiles had established
themselves. There was again something inde¬
finably pathetic about him. His mind wandered
nearly as much as his feet had, and there dawned
on me the thought that sleeping sickness and
morphia had claimed him for their own. And
so they had. He died a month or two afterwards
with the desire of his beloved Africa as deep in him
as when he first felt her wondrous fascination.
I have often thought of Central Africa as a huge
lamp of death, and those who once get a glamour
of her vast lands as the poor moths of mankind
that will for ever hover round her, until they
destroy their lives in a hopeless endeavour to
probe the mystery of her attractions. Poor Z.
was but one of the moths, and I do not suppose
that his corpse will deter one other from j ourneying
on his last “ulendo” when the subtle influence
of the great continent has buried itself in the
soul of his desires.
Happily for the world, it is a thin partition that
separates tragedy from comedy. Old Y. was
often a humorous person. And in a remarkable
degree he possessed one of the essential qualifica-
tions of the true African pioneer—that he
should be able to tell a large number of really
remarkable lion stories, just as the old hand in
the south-western portions of the United States
of America is not deemed of very much account
unless he can relate, at a moment’s notice, a
long series of hair-raising experiences with rattle¬
snakes. It is not for me to judge between the
two types—I do not know enough of the genuine
Arizona product. But I do know that some of
the lion yarns in circulation in Central Africa
indicate remarkably queer traits in the character
of the King of Beasts—little whims and ways
concerning which the world’s greatest zoologists
are plunged in an ignorance profoundly dark.
For instance, I do not for a moment suppose
that Lankester or Lydekker have ever—even in
their wildest dreams—conceived the idea of a
lion sneezing himself to death. And yet Y.
assured me, the first night I met him, that he
had killed scores of lions by providing them with
an excuse for sneezing. Being just the least
little bit sceptical I ventured to ask him how
it was done. Y. puffed thoughtfully at his pipe
for a moment or two, and then—44 Why,” said
he, 44 it’s the easiest thing in the world. You
just build a little arch out of jagged rocks, in
the middle of the bush; then you kill a zebra
or a buck, and put him under the arch. You
must be careful that the centre stone of the arch
is exceedingly jagged, and that the opening in
the pile of stones is large enough to allow a
lion to crawl in. After this, you throw a lot
of pepper all over the 4 kill,’ and then—well, then,
if there are any lions about, you’re sure to get one.”
Although I did not like to brandish my ignorance
in the man’s face, I could not help asking for a
little further explanation. He looked at me
in a sympathetic manner, and went on to make
the whole matter plain. 44 Well,” said he, 64 what
would you do if you suddenly shoved your nose
into the middle of a high-grade cayenne pepper
proposition ? Sneeze, wouldn’t you ? Of course
you would, and—so does the bally lion ! Now
as soon as you start to sneeze, you chuck your
head up, don’t you ? Well, so does the bally
lion, and, of course, he dashes his brains in against
the jagged stone of the arch ! ”
Questioned as to his record lion bag in one
night, the hero of the foregoing narrative remarked,
44 Never more than five between dusk and dawn
with the pepper trick, young man; but I remem¬
ber killing fifteen in a quarter of an hour, back
in ’91, with a rifle. It was this way,” he went on.
44 I was camped on the Angwa River one dark
night, and the lions were grunting all round my
camp. There was a little mound just in front
of my tent, and presently I saw two beads of
fire peering at me over the mound. I knew there
was a lion close at hand, so I loaded my Martini
and fired—fired right between the eyes. I’m
a pretty fair shot, I am, and I knew I’d hit; but
when I looked again there were them two beads
still peerin’ at me out of the dark. 4 Queer,’ I
remarked to myself, and got in a second shot.
But the eyes were still there. Again I took a
careful aim and pulled the trigger, and still the
beads stared at me. Well, to cut a long story
short, I fired fourteen times, and after the
fourteenth shot I was, as you may imagine,
fairly disgusted at what I thought was my wicked
shooting. 4 Here goes for the last attempt,’
I’UKU ANTELOPE, A WATER-LOVING BUCK; NORTHERN RHODESIA
I muttered. Bang! and I chucked the gun away

expecting still to see the eyes of that confounded
lion looking at me. But no—the beads had gone,
and I went to bed saying, 4 Well, at last I’ve
done for the brute, but what shocking shooting ! ”
Next mornin’—would you believe me !—I found
eight lions and seven lionesses lying dead, all
bunched together behind the mound. The
brutes had evidently come up, one after the
other, to see what all the banging and killing
was about; so my eye wasn’t dead out that
night, after all ! Just shows how a man can be
deceived ! ”
Perhaps Y.’s most curious adventures happened

in the Congo Free State. Some years ago he
was concluding a very successful ivory-hunting
and trading expedition, and was anxious to
reach some trading post in British territory,
where he could dispose of his spoils. Having
no wish to come in contact with Belgian officials,
he travelled through a dry, uninhabited region
where game was exceedingly scarce. Y. and
his 44 tenga tengas ” (porters) had a very bad
time, and nearly died from thirst and starvation.
At last he reached a village one night and sum¬
moned the old chief. Y. told him he was very
hungry and that he must have some meat, in
return for which he would give the chief a
44 prizee ” in the form of 44 n’salu ” (cloth).
The chief retired, sent over something to Y.’s
cook-boy, and presently a boiling in the pot
announced to Y., now silently puffing at his
pipe, that he was to have something to eat.
Ravenously hungry, he devoured the repast,
and enjoyed it so much that he sent for more.
Presently the 44 cookie ” served up the second
helping, and Y. devoured that too. Later the
chief came over for his reward, and Y. asked
him what particular kind of 44 n’yama * ” it was
which he had eaten. 44 Bwana (master),” replied
the old man, 44 that was my cousin! ”
* Meat.
CHAPTER VI
NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA (CONTINUED) :

EQUATORIAL FABLES—THE JOYS OF FREEDOM
The greater part of my time in 1909 was spent

in the Luangwa Valley, where sleeping sickness
is now at its fell work. Here amongst the
magnificent herds of great game, the tropical
scenery and the primitive Awisa I enjoyed many
an interesting week. I do not know which of
these I found the more engaging—perhaps the
natives.
There are few more interesting studies in Africa
than the study of native folk-lore. The Central
African natives have their own fairy stories just
as the children of Europe have their own ingeni¬
ous fiction of Grimm and Hans Andersen where¬
with to while away the passing hour, and wonder¬
fully interesting some of these Equatorial fables
are. All Central Africans in reality are children,
and all hear the anecdotes of how the rhinoceros
lost his third horn, or how the Chameleon brought
disease and death into the world, with rapt
attention. Nearly every village has a story-teller,
and on every “ ulendo,” or caravan, you will
find one who can draw forth loud grunts of
applause from the listeners round the camp-fire.
No creature of creation is the subject of so
much romance as the Chameleon. If you have
been in Africa, you will have noticed that the
native loathes this curious insect-reptile with his
87
great staring eyes and the fickle glories of his
skin, and if you have ever picked one up and
put it on your shoulder or your hat, you may
have observed that your “ boys ” gazed on you
with mixed expressions of fear and disgust.
For the Chameleon is to them what the serpent
in the garden of Eden is to us—a perpetual
reminder of the great error made by mankind
in the beginnings of things, an error which has
irrevocably changed the first laws of the Creator
and has brought sickness, suffering and sin into
this world of sorrows.
The story of the Chameleon, the third chapter
of the Bantu Genesis, is known over a great
portion of Africa, although there are varying
versions in different parts of the Continent. But
the most universally accepted tale is that in the
beginning of things man only died in war, in
battle with man or wild beasts. Sickness was
unknown, and the people multiplied and multi¬
plied so that the crops of the world were in¬
sufficient to feed them. Then the rulers of
mankind joined together, and in solemn and
secret conference agreed to send the Lizard on
a mission to the Deity, praying that death should
come about by means other than those of violence.
“ There will be more food for the survivors,”
said the sages of first government. And so the
Lizard went his way.
But there was one member of that secret
gathering who, like some members of secret
conferences in our own day, was unable to
respect the mighty trust reposed in him. He
talked, and a furious and amazed populace held
an indignation meeting, at which it was decided
to appeal against the unauthorized petition
carried by the Lizard.
By a curious piece of misfortune the Chameleon
was elected to carry this appeal. He was
threatened and coaxed, and at last he set off
with most definite instructions as to his mission,
and the pleas and commands of the world at
large that he was to “m’sanga! m’sanga! ”
(hurry! hurry!). He went a little way, and lo !
he found a swarm of gnats. He fed and then
indulged in a very lengthy siesta. Eventually
he was ushered into the presence of the Deity,
and he delivered his appeal. 44 Alas,” said the
Deity, 44 you are many moons too late. Long
ago the Lizard came here, and I have already
sent into the world my legions of sickness and
lingering death.”
There is another version of this pretty primitive
tale in which the Chameleon is held to blame for
the black skin of the negro. Originally he was
white, and it was only because of the dawdlings
of the Chameleon on an important mission to the
Deity that his complexion was changed to black.
And thus it is that the Chameleon—44 lumfwe ”
of the Awemba and 44 gorumankwe ” of the
Angoni—is so greatly loathed.
The Swazis, too, have a somewhat similar
legend, but with them the particular bete noire
of their 44 In the beginning ” is a small lizard
with a red tail, on which they wage a perpetual
warfare of extinction, but still the lizard runs
around their kraals and seems to brandish his
appalling crime in their faces.
Of quite a different nature is the Book of
Genesis of the Masai, those lithe, ochre-stained
savages who a few years ago were the terror of
all East Africa. Amongst their serfs were the
N’Derobo, a curious people who live in the
depths of the great forests of the escarpments
of Eastern Equatorial Africa, so shy, so wonder¬
fully active, that they may well be termed the
squirrels of mankind. Even to this day, the
N’Derobo stand in some ill-defined servile rela¬
tionship to the Masai. The first lines in the
book of Creation, according to these warlike
overlords, are not properly understood by Euro¬
peans, indeed the number of white men who
have acquired any true insight into the intricacies
of the beautiful language of the Masai—so full
of Z’s and o’s that many of the words are as the
sound of laughing waters—is exceedingly few.
In their Book of Genesis the actors in the first
scene in the great tragedy of creation are a
Masai “ el moran55 (or warrior), a N’Derobo slave
and an ox. The ox was let down from heaven
by the Deity, but I fear I am unable to puruse
the fable further, for I have but little knowledge
of it.
Exodus, too, has its native versions as well as
Genesis. The second chapter of the second book
of Moses has a rendering in the far northern parts
of Rhodesia which, although it represents a
considerable distortion of the story in the Old
Testament, is unmistakably a parallel.
Just as the daughter of Pharaoh came down
to wash herself at the river and found the ark
among the flags with Moses inside it, so did some
dusky daughter of a great chief in the dim long
ago find a baby in a little boat among the reeds,
and the baby, like Moses, grew up to be the
deliverer of his race from the oppressors.
There is a fascination about these fables of the
Equator which makes them subjects of ex¬
traordinary interest. There are many people
who suppose that the African native has no
sense or appreciation of the romantic, and that
the mind of the baby Bantu is not nourished

on fairy tales and little conundrums like enlight¬
ened John Jones, aged four. But these views
are wholly wrong. The tales of the African
child grow up with him just as the bean-stalks
and the giant-killers linger in our memories long
after we have given up the toys of the nursery
for the sterner playthings of life. Our riddles
remain with us throughout the enigma of exist¬
ence; and so do the sayings of the native, his
conundrums and proverbs give him ready-made
philosophy and wit when the happy days of
childhood have been exchanged for the no less
happy days of man’s estate.
44 Nyurnbu yopanda chitseko?” (The house
without a door?) queries one, and another answers,
44 Dzera ” (an egg).
44 Kantu cosa mangeka ? ” (A thing you cannot
tie up ?), says the old chief, and logic falls from
the lips of one of his wives when she replies,
44 M’Pepo ” (the wind).
44 Kantu cosa nyarnbula ? ” he remarks (A thing
you cannot lift?). Reason beneath a score of
ugly wrinkles answers, 44 Chintunsi-tunsi ” (a
shadow).
44 The white man makes a big fire and sits a
long way from it, but the black man lights a
little one and sits close to it,” says the Central
African native. The truth of this remark must
be manifest to all who have wandered through
the interior and have lounged back in a com¬
fortable deck chair at a respectful distance from
a great, blazing pile of logs, whilst, squatting close
around a number of small fires, the 44 tenga
tengas” (porters)—the sinews of the expedition
—while away the evening with jest and gesture,
their feet almost in the flames. And when the
cool night winds sigh through the forest their
woolly heads, you may observe, rest so close to
the heated embers that you will wonder how it
is they do not burn as well. But there is far
more in the simple expression than is evident in
this little elucidation of the strictly literal pur¬
port of the remark. We of the white race are
at infinite pains and ruinous expenditure to rear
up unto ourselves gigantic edifices, and when
we have built them we feel lonely within their
portals. We fuss and fret to gain ourselves
pleasures and comforts, and when we have
secured them we fear to reap the full measure
of our joys. In short, we kindle titanic furnaces
at sacrifice of a tremendous amount of labour
and time and expense, and then the heat is so
great that it drives us from it. And the negro
in his primitive wisdom concerns himself only
with those toys which he can indulge in to his
heart’s content, builds grass huts at a minimum
of trouble, lights his little fires in the middle
of them and sits over the warming flames. And
who do you think is the wiser?
Those who do not know the Central African
native are far too apt to assign to him an ignor¬
ance which he does not possess, and to imagine
him incapable of any wisdom or reasoning which
exceeds that of the beasts of the fields. The
dwellers of the mysterious interior have no
literature, but they have their stories, and the
folk-lore of Central Africa is the most interesting
in the world. They have their music, too, and
although you might not appreciate the wondrous
fascination of the soft sibilant chants or the deep
roar of the chorus if you heard it on the stage
of a music-hall, you would, in Central Africa,
listen entranced to the march song of a “ ulendo,”
the mellow notes of the primitive instruments—

bits of iron fastened on to a piece of wood and
stretched over a calabash—or the song of the
women as they pound up the grain in receptacles
constructed out of the hollowed-out trunk of a
tree. One woman—the picture of grace and
proud carriage—raises the pounding pole and
brings it down with all the force of her muscular
body on the grain. She raises it with a quick
and graceful movement and her companion’s pole
takes its place.
And as they pound they sing in a sweet, clear
monotone—
“ Chiuli iwe, chiuli iwe
M’Buyache, m’buy ache,
Chiuli iwe, chiuli iwe
Itana m’kadzachi.”
You may note the perfect poetry of the song, a

poetry which is paralleled only by the graceful
movements of the grain-beaters.
And then the chorus—
“ Chiuli kusesa
Itana m’kadzi chiuli.”
Such is the Central African grain song. It is,

I suppose, a sort of Equatorial nursery rhyme,
for you may observe the rapt attention of the
children, a look of admiring appreciation on their
faces as they listen to the song of their mothers.
“ Chiuli ” is the frog, and the song concerns him
and his friend “ calling his wife.”
44 Chiuli kusinga,”
Frog grind up the food.
“ Chiuli kusesa,”
Frog sweep (the house).
That is the chorus, and I imagine the moral
and meaning of the ditty is that the frog looks
for his wife to labour on his behalf, just as the
women grind up the food whilst their lords and
masters sit themselves in the doors of their
huts and idle away the happy sunshine of their
lives.
The natives of Africa have their tales and
their fables, their music and their poetry, their
philosophy and their proverbs, just as we have,
and I am not at all sure but that their fairy
tales are more entrancing than are ours, that
their music and poetry are more fascinating,
and that their proverbs are more wise than
those on which we pride ourselves. And they
have their prophets, too, just as we have our
magicians and clairvoyants, and they are more
wonderful than any we can boast of.
Along the banks of the Kafue River dwell the
people of the famous Mushukulumbwe tribe,
so called by the Barotse because of the curious
horn-shaped growth of their hair on the fore
part of their heads.
These fierce savages—the people from whom
Selous and Holub had such narrow escapes many
years ago, and who are greatly feared by the
neighbouring tribes—are the Baila, and their
language is called Chila.
The Baila are a strange people. They have
intermingled with no other tribes, and are, in fact,
amongst the most insular people in Africa. For
miles round the Mushukulumbwe country the
land is uninhabited. There is no paramount
chief of the Mushukulumbwe as there is with
most other African tribes. Each village has its
own headman who pays homage to none. In
the past the Mushukulumbwe have fought bitterly
amongst one another, but they are now fairly

pacific.
The Chila language is believed by authorities
to be amongst the very oldest in all Bantu Africa.
But there is an archaic form of Chila which is
only understood by a very few old chiefs, and is
spoken by none when in normal condition.
Certain of the Baila prophets, however, possess
the faculty of throwing themselves into a trance.
Apparently no drugs or herbs are used, the
action is quite spontaneous, and when in this
trance they prophesy in this dead language.
Here we have some evidence of transmigration
which is as strong as anything in our philosophy
of the occult. Reincarnation is a common belief
all over Africa. The Awemba, for instance, will
tell you that there are two kinds of lions—the
n’kalamu, or ordinary hunting lion, and the
chisenguka, or man-eater, into which type have
departed the spirits of their dead chiefs.
It is not for us to scoff at these ideas, for
many of the white race profess a more weird
belief than this. Nor can we deride the strange
attraction of the Central African’s music or the
simple beauty of his fairy tales. They are all
so barbarously natural that our own elevated
parallels fall harsh and affected on the senses by
comparison. We have not the true insight into
Nature which the African has. He who wishes
to understand Nature must live with her, just
as he who desires the full heat of a fire must sit
close by it. And we who build big fires sit a
long way from them.
Late one afternoon I reached N’Tanta’s, a
village of the Awisa tribe, situated on one of the
backwaters of the Luangwa River. For days I
had been “ spooring ” a wounded elephant, and
I was not sorry to rest for a while under the
great shady trees which surround the little
cluster of grass huts of N’Tanta’s people.
Presently the old chief came up to greet me.
He was a picturesque figure, and I could not help
wondering how many years had gone over his
head, then crowned by a dirty, well-worn turban,
once, no doubt, red, but then a brilliant pink in
colour. His skin was wrinkled and furrowed
with age, and his stubbly gray beard showed
indeed that he was a father of his people. That
turban was, no doubt, given him by a party of
Arab elephant hunters, who, a quarter of a
century ago, overran Central Africa, collect¬
ing ivory and slaves for the Zanzibar markets.
Old N’Tanta had been a mighty hunter in
his day, and when I told him that I had for
long been following a wounded elephant with
very big tusks, he assured me that his people
would find the animal for me next day.
The Central African native, be he chief or
menial, will invariably tell you just what he
thinks will be most pleasing to your ears,
and I found old N’Tanta no exception to this
rule.
Presently he saluted me in the true and
orthodox native style—a style which, should
you wander much over Africa, you will notice
has no part in the philosophy of the civilized
African. A minute afterwards he had disap¬
peared amongst the huts. By-and-by he re¬
turned with one or two headmen, each bearing
a skinny fowl, a few eggs, and a basket of sweet
potatoes—presents for the white man. I gave
him some cloth and antelope meat in exchange,
and as a smile of satisfaction curled round the
twisted corners of his mouth I again fell to
wondering on his age. But N’Tanta, of course,

had no fitting sense of his antiquity. He could
remember when on both banks of the Luangwa
great herds of buffalo roamed in such numbers
that the 64 dambos,” or little open clearings in
the bush, were black with them. That was
before the “ great sickness ” (rinderpest) came
over the land and decimated the herds. He
could remember, too, a white man—the first
he had ever seen—who had stayed for a while
under the very tree which now afforded me
shade. That was a long, long time ago, but he
remembered the sojourn of the weary traveller
well. The white man’s attendants loved him,
and said that he had come into this world to
break the yoke of the slave raiders. N’Tanta
had heard that this man had afterwards died
near the great lake which lay several days west
of his village, and that his heart had been buried
there, while his body had been carried to the
coast. But N’Tanta could remember events
which took place long before the rinderpest
swept over the country, long before David
Livingstone had written his name in great letters
of noble achievement over the heart of his
beloved Africa. Back in the recesses of N’Tanta’s
memory were visions of the coming of a terrible
tribe of people over the crests of the far-away
Muchingas, and the old man shook his head as
he spoke of their cruel raids and bloody con¬
quests. As the sun began to sink over the
western forest land he hobbled off to his newly-
thatched hut, and throughout the shadows of
dusk I watched him contentedly sitting in front
of his inglorious home, still shaking his head and
ejaculating to himself over the eventful memories
of the past.
With the first crimson flush of the tropical
dawn I saw N’Tanta bring out a burning ember
from his hut and kindle a small fire. A dirty
piece of calico was wrapped round his shrivelled-
up body, and he crouched over the little flames
and waited for the warmth of the African sun.
Year after year he has stretched himself out on
a cleverly woven grass mat and basked in the
heat of the day. He has no cares, no thought
for the morrow, no regrets for the past. His
grandchildren work for him in the gardens, and
his great-grandchildren play round in the soil
of his own little piece of the earth. In our
acceptance of the word he is not rich, but he
has no need of work. We may regard him as a
poor ignorant heathen, but he has more know¬
ledge of that great jewel of life called contentment
than we who live in the strenuous highways of
this world can ever have. Perhaps you will
marvel at the absolute inaction of his life, but
remember that monotony, like pleasure and
sorrow, is wholly relative.
One day old N’Tanta will lie stark and still
under the grass roofs of his home. There will
be weeping and wailing amongst his people, and
presently his aged body will be reverently carried
to the confines of the village and laid to rest in
a shallow grave. Over this will be built a dwarf
hut, and inside its walls will be placed an earthen¬
ware pot full of water, and perhaps some food,
drink and meat for the departed spirit. When
night falls there will be a big beer drink in the
village, and the monotonous beat of the drums
will mingle with the queer laughing grunts of
the hippopotamus disporting himself in the
waters of the Luangwa. Not until dawn will
the drummers stay their hands, and with the
first gleam of light another miniature monarch

will rise in the place of the dead chief.
The life of old N’Tanta is typical of the people
who inhabit the valley of the Luangwa, and for
the matter of that of the whole of Central Africa.
I do not think it can be called uneventful, and
it is certainly not without its own peculiar
interest. Perhaps you will term it a life of no
consequence, and yet I think it possesses some
features which are worthy of the consideration
of the most highly civilized mortals of this age.
Even the primitive native of Central Africa can
teach us something, for in his natural state he
is the most satisfied of all the races of the world.
We may scorn his nakedness and his poverty,
but the mad onward rush of modern life does
not permit us to know of the unsullied joys of
unfettered freedom, and they are surely his.
CHAPTER VII
NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA (CONTINUED)

IN THE GRIP OF THE WILDS
There were large numbers of elephants in the

Luangwa Valley in the latter part of 1909, and
I spent much time hunting them and observing
their habits. What an intensely interesting and
almost human document the life story of one of
these great beasts would make! We can imagine
the birth of the baby pachyderm in some remote
valley fastness between the Muchingas and the
Chinicoatali Mountains, the upbringing of the
little Titan, and then the memorable day when
his mother led him from the foothills and out
into the 46 dambos ” and bush.
He remembered that well, because he had
never before undertaken such a journey. The
next day the herd crossed the fringe of those
great plains which surround the swamped lands
of the lake. There were no trees to afford them
shade in the heat of the day on this great mono¬
tonous expanse of land, where the grass was
grazed down almost to the roots by countless
herds of zebra and tsessebe. His grown-up
consorts therefore did not halt for a mid-day
siesta on the plains, but all day and all night
they moved at a great, long, striding pace which
taxed him sorely to make. Presently they began
to ascend the north-western slopes of the
Muchingas—that majestic range of bush-clad
100
mountains which strikes right across North-

Eastern Rhodesia almost to Lake Tanganyika.
By mid-day they had reached a little valley deep
in the heart of the range, where the clear waters
of the Nyamadzi tumbled along over many little
rapids to join the sluggish Luangwa. Here were
leafy trees and lofty liyphcene palms, with nuts
clustering below the fan-like fronds. The ele¬
phants spent many days here enjoying the
delicious shade of the trees, the crystal waters
of the streams, and feeding on the pungent
outer rind of the hyphoene fruits. The subject
of this sketch enjoyed his sojourn in the
Muchingas immensely until the severe quietude
of his life was broken by the enactment of a
great tragedy.
It was mid-day, and he had been sleeping
under a clump of euphorbia trees with his mother
and a dozen other elephants around him. His
slumbers were rudely disturbed by the sharp
crack of a rifle, and as the echoes of the shot
vibrated through the hills he saw a great bull
elephant stagger and fall only a yard or two
away from him. Then he heard his mother
give a scream of rage and charge madly forward.
He crashed after her, and as he did so he caught
a whiff of evil-smelling air, a scent which always
afterwards warned him of the presence of some
awful danger, just as that short, sharp sound
always made him fearful and angry. Suddenly
there was another crack and down fell his
mother. She tore up the ground with her one
long tusk, and then he saw her curl her trunk
around some curious object, the like of which
he had never before gazed on. With a soul-
rending scream of rage she half raised herself
from the ground, wet with blood from her trunk.
Then she dashed the object to earth with all
her mighty force, pierced it with her tusk, and
in her dying ferocity screamed and screamed
again. He was terrified and bewildered, and,
hearing the crashing of his consorts in the trees
in front of him, he dashed after them. He could
not wholly understand how this awful crisis in
his life had been brought about, and yet in his
rapidly developing brain he realized that he had
for the first time met his eternal enemy—that
puny member of creation who is named man.
Away and away the elephants marched from
the valley of calamity, away to the pools of the
Luangwa, where the n’jenje berries, the wild
peaches, the tall rich grasses and the mahogany
and kigelia trees robe the banks of the river in
a riotous growth of vegetation. For long he
remained here, and when the rains came he
waded through the water-logged country and
sometimes ventured into the gardens of the
Awisa.
Occasionally a wave of suspicion would waft
over him, and he would raise his trunk like a
great python and scent the air for that taint
which he always associated with danger, perhaps
death.
There he remains to this day, moving from the
slumbering river away to his favourite feeding-
grounds, marching from water-hole to water-hole,
tearing down the bark of trees, sometimes
travelling with his great brothers and sisters,
sometimes wandering through the forests alone.
And when his great shadow darkens the moonlit
clearings in the bush even the lion—the so-called
king of beasts—snarls and slinks away. For the
baby born in the Muchinga foothills has become
the lord of creation.
ELEPHANT ; LUANGWA VALLEY
(Note the'size of the animal’s ear)
After securing two bull elephants in the

Luangwa I marched towards the Muchingas,
and never shall I forget the journey which
brought me to the bottom of the range.
It had been a long, trying march, carried out
through a day of memorable heat, memorable
even in the valley of the Luangwa, where the
thermometer sometimes rises to 118 degrees in
the shade, and each breath of fiery wind is
wafted as if from the open gates of Hell. Since
daybreak we had tramped along native paths,
through miniature forests, over rocky hillocks,
across laggard streams. My 44 tenga-tengas ”
were foot-sore and weary, and so was I. The
cruel, glaring glamour of the sun lessened, as
though the heavens had at last taken pity on
the scorched earth, and the more restful shades
of late afternoon came to my little caravan like
a draught of crystal water to one lost in a desert.
We had reached a native village, a cluster of
reed-thatched huts inhabited by a few score
of Awisa. Away to the north a great tower¬
ing wall of blue frowned down on the little
settlement—the south-eastern pinnacles of the
Muchinga Mountains.
I had pitched my wandering camp and lay
back in the comfortable canvas of a deck chair,
with my face to the rugged grandeur of the
escarpment. A hundred paces away the rippling
rhapsody of the Nyamadzi river, released from
the rugged portals of its mountain home, fell
as a murmur on the evening air. Presently
the dying sun sank like a globe of furnace fire
on the mountain tops, and hurled red shafts of
departing glory across the western sky. The
grim old buttresses of the mountains had wit¬
nessed such a scene since the beginning of things.
Sphinx-like in their solemnity, the last rose-red
farewell blush of sunset seemed to kiss their
colossal outlines and bathe sky and mountain
top in a flare of crimson. And then the majesty
of the whole thing dimmed, died, and the dismal
mantle of dusk robbed the Muchingas of their
glory.
While my eyes had feasted on this masterpiece
of transformation my mind had mused on the
eternal vigil of the mountain crests, which
stood up against the sky like giant sentinels.
What war and rapine they had gazed on !
What ages of life’s unending turmoil of tragedy
and transition they had known ! And they had
watched it all with never a gesture; just a grim,
disdainful smile. They stood on the mountain
road that led from the fertile Luangwa, where
the agricultural Awisa tilled their crops, to the
land of the warlike Awemba, blood-loving and
cruel, the terror of all this vast tract of Central
Africa. They put a barrier between Mars and
Ceres, and Mars had leaped their hurdles and
plunged the land in crimson. For this is an
African Aceldama. The chronicles of the Arab
slave raiders, which were recorded in vulture-
picked skeletons, slave-sticks and bleached bones
from Lake Mweru to Zanzibar, hold no such
awful chapters as the tale the mountain sentinels
might tell. The days have not long gone by
when the broad blades of the Awemba spears
cried loud for quivering flesh, when blood filled
the rivers, and the breasts of women withered
on the thatch of many a hut.
Visions of Rider Haggard’s romance, King
Solomon's Mines, flashed before me that evening
as I watched night fall on the Muchingas. Might
not that majestic range be the Suliman Berg of

the African novelist’s fantasy ? Might not Twala,
the one-eyed, the terrible, have held bloody sway
in the land of barbaric romance that lay beyond ?
And might not Gagool, the evil witch-hag, have
smelt out her luckless victims among the torture-
loving Awemba? Just ere the great dark sheet
of night dropped on the Muchingas silhouetted
against the quickening dusk, the skull of the old
Portuguese adventurer, Jose da Silvestre, seemed
to peer at me from a cavern high up on the
castellated crags, and Allan Quatermain, Sir
Henry Curtis and Good beckoned from the
serrated summits.
And well might Rider Haggard have drawn
his most forceful scenes of cruelty and savage
abandon from those tall, lithe heathens who have
spread over much of British Central Africa from
the Congo, black as the darkest hour of midnight,
with hair shaved back from their foreheads and
great scars seared on cheeks and chests—their
tribal tattoo marks. The Awemba are true sons
of the Dark and Last Continent. They have
many customs and superstitions which are re¬
markable, but it is their love of blood and the
infliction of pain and suffering that stamp them
most markedly.
If the Dyaks of Borneo have earned the
sobriquet of the 44 head hunters,” the Awemba
may well be named the seekers of limbs. Mutila¬
tion is but the fortune of war, revolting torture
the penance for a liaison. They have revised
Scripture, and instead of 44 an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth,” it is a tongue for a lie
and an arm for a theft. It will be seen that their
penal code is a severe one. I may be pardoned if
I correct myself and write 44 has been a severe
one,” for British justice and the men who
administer it in the back-yards of the Empire
have practically stamped out these atrocious
practices.
If their sense of criminal punishment has been
stern, what can one write of their devilish
dealings to the vanquished in war ?—eyes gouged
out, lips and noses sliced away, arms and legs cut
off. The technical advisers of the Inquisition
might have envied their erudite cruelty.
There is, or rather was, an instrument of tor¬
ture among the Awemba known as the “ lamvia.”
After I had scaled the Muchingas I travelled
through a considerable portion of the Awemba
country and tried hard to secure one of these
charming affairs, but without success. The
44 lamvia ” consists of a hollowed-out sable
antelope’s or bullock’s horn, and is fitted with
a crude kind of mask and a bell. Into this the
head of the unfortunate captive or offender
against the laws of the Awemba was forced and
his throat was cut. The blood spurted forth
into the horn and rang the bell, to the immense
enjoyment of the lookers-on.
Yet, despite their cruel, warlike natures, I
always found the Awemba Nature’s gentlemen.
When I visited Luchembe’s village, Luchembe,
paramount chief of the Awemba south of the
Chambezi River, saluted me, gave me presents
of sweet potatoes, and furnished me with a guide
to lead me to the great marshes of Lake Ban-
gweolo. One cannot but shudder at their love
of mutilation, but to any white man who upholds
the dignity of his race among them they are as
respectful as they are kindly; for they are
unsullied savages, who have not cut themselves

on the ragged edges of what the modern, clever
world is pleased to call civilization. In time, I
suppose they will do so, unless a halt is called
in the mad movement for heathen enlightenment.
The able Native Commissioners of this vast
abode have put a merciful stop to those blood
enactments, which must have made the Awemba
“ sphere of influence 55 a region of rapine. And
the Native Commissioners are all-sufficient.
They are the best missionaries for the true,
primitive pagan. Si fetais le roi, they should
be the only media of culture I would tolerate.
For the time Awembaland is pacific, and the
stone sentinels on the mountain tops see only
the bands of porters carrying the commerce of
peace over the meandering, rocky footpaths of
the Muchingas.
Still at times the embers of the fire that burns
so fiercely, and that was trodden on and stamped
by the iron heel of Great Britain, glow for a while,
as though they would again burst into furious
flame. Thus they glowed not so very long ago,
and it is probable that only the influence of one
man, a Government servant, who had long held
the reins of office at Chinsali, smothered the
smouldering heap. Teach the heathen Awemba
that all men are brothers, and again the mountain
sentinels may gaze with a sardonic smile on
rivers that run red and paths that lead to piles
of severed limbs.
A chilly breath of night wind that came
sighing over the tree-tops disturbed my reverie.
All around me fires burned merrily and natives
laughed and chatted. To-morrow I had to climb
the towering wall of rugged rock, and so I sought
my stretcher bed. The mournful howl of the
hyaena wailed across the Nyamadzi like the
despairing cry of an earth-bound soul, and then
I fell asleep and climbed the paths to dream¬
land. The Muchingas still frowned down on me,
and on the highest pinnacle I saw Twala the
one-eyed. He bore the tribal marks of the
Awemba. War was painted on him. In his
left hand he held a mighty, murderous spear and
I saw its broad blade quiver. He clenched both
hands above him, and I looked to see what it
was that he grasped so tightly in his right.
It was a Bible.
Hurrah ! The crest of the Muchingas at last

was reached. Panting we sat down on the edge
of the escarpment and looked down on the heat
haze of the Luangwa, which wrapped forests and
64 dambos ” in a quivering sheen of mist. After
a short stay in M’Pika I journeyed eastwards to
a rugged and practically unknown country, one
of the vast tracts of Africa still in the Pleistocene
Age, where the shrill whistle of the locomotive
has never been heard, a region in the womb of
time. This is one of those lands which have
taken up a last stand for Nature, where yet no
tidings of the civilized Nativity have been borne.
Here is a monarchy of Solitude, a primeval prin¬
cipality, of which the prince is Paganism and
his sceptre Savagery. Great rugged mountain
ranges jeer at the petty, struggling modernity which
you may see growing like a violet in a strangling
tangle of lianas on the Shire Highlands. Placid
pools and rippling rivers, plains and forests,
valleys and torrents proclaim their fealty to the
sway of World Dawn. It is in parts of this
Stronghold of Genesis that the most ugly of the

earth’s surviving pachyderms, the rhinoceros,
roams at will, browses at his heart’s desire, and
wallows in his mud baths at his most primitive
majesty’s pleasure.
Poor old rhinoceros ! I always think there is
something pathetic about you as well as some¬
thing hideous and fearsome ! It is as though the
onward march of time had left you far, far
behind—a struggling survivor of another world,
a lone, solitary old animal. Between the
Muchingas and the Chinicoatali Mountains there
is a huge, open valley, where rhinoceroses wander
in great numbers. On either side of this play¬
ground of pachyderms rugged, castellated ranges
tower heavenwards. Here in the early mornings
the lions roar and roar from their rocky fastnesses
on the flanks of the mountains until the air seems
to vibrate with the might of their voices. Along
every native path, up each age-beaten track,
one may see the spoor of the rhino. In every
pool the mud has been churned up by the great
beasts, everywhere twigs have been browsed,
streams traversed by the silent army, each unit
of which carries two murderous horns. Ask the
members of the mixed Awemba and Awisa popu¬
lation which scantily people this land, and they
will tell you “ chipembere ” are on all sides.
At night the beasts silently stalk around and
around the clusters of huts; in the daytime they
hide themselves in the dense forests which flank
the offshoots of the mountain ranges. Roaming
at will, feeding at will, drinking as they please,
the life of the rhinoceros in this vast valley of
the far-distant interior is one of pachydermal
peace. But there comes a day when a puny
little creature on two legs arrives on murder
bent, and then there is righteous indignation in
the Principality of the Pleistocene.
Rhino after rhino I found in this domain of
the savage. Four I shot; others I did not
trouble to hunt. One I tried vainly to photo¬
graph in life, but the dense forests defeated my
object, and the great, stupid, blundering beast
evaded me. Often in the cold dark hours before
the dawn, when the camp-fires had burned low,
and silence—deep, dominating silence—pervaded
all, I awoke to find a native standing by my
bed and whispering, “ Bwana, chipembere fika ”
(“ Master, the rhinoceros comes). For a few
moments the vast silence seemed to give the lie
to the anxious tone of the “ boy,” and then the
sharp crack of a twig, a rustling of the grass, or
the heavy tread of the great feet told that a
rhinoceros was passing by, and the cracking
twigs were but the dullest notes of this pachy-
dermal nocturne. There are few more memorable
moments in the life of man than a few seconds
such as these; particles of time fraught with
the delirium of an excitement absolute and
supreme. Huddled round your bed are little
groups of natives, anxious, alarmed, alert; and
when, presently, the sound of the monster’s
march dies away in the night air, the little
groups talk quietly among themselves and ponder
on the morrow and what it may bring forth.
When the sun has thrown his cloak of tender
gold o’er forest and plain you may see four men
trudging through the thorn bushes, scaling stony
paths on the edge of the mountain-land, pushing
on with eyes bent on the ground for the tell-tale
tracks, ears all a-listening for the least sound;
senses alert and strained. Here there is a clear

impression of the great three-toed foot, there
a branch half-browsed.
One of the four men is white and the other
three are black, but until you have looked closely
at the white man you would scarcely have
realized that the bronzed, long-legged, thorn-torn
being in the rent clothes was of European birth,
so sun-tanned, ragged and filthy does he look.
Swarms of awful biting insects—the tsetse fly
of the Dark Continent—fasten on legs and arms
and stab as though a red-hot hatpin had gone
deep into the flesh. But the joy of slaying,
which is bred in the bones of so many, braves
the vicious bite of the tsetse, the tears of the
cruel thorns, the glaring glamour and hellish heat
of the sun; and, presently, there is the reward—
the sight of the mighty animal standing amid
the bushes; the shot, perhaps a charge, and a
native gored; perhaps the white man with a few
smashed ribs or a broken arm. Though the
rhinoceros is the least formidable of the five
really dangerous beasts of Africa, more than
one has lost his life in encounters with the
“ borili55 and the “ keitloa,” the two “ varieties ”
of the “ zwaart rhenoster,” as adjudged or
classified by the length of their horns. They
are great, short-sighted, blundering animals, of
keen scent and keen hearing, hideous as gargoyles,
irresistible as locomotives.
The day will come when they, like all the
members of the primeval world, will disappear
before the mad onward rush of civilization, and
the titanic pachyderm will have to fight the
locomotive—as he has done literally before to-day
on the Uganda Railway—and the locomotive will
8
win. The world will be the poorer for a true
and living relic of the long ago when the hideous
old monster is gone. Away in his far-distant
stronghold, where the twin ranges dip down into
the great valley, and where round many a camp
I have eaten the questionable tit-bit of rhinoceros
liver, the monster has bid defiance to the outside
world. One day, I suppose, tourists from the
Transvaal will be sauntering down those slopes
where now elephants and rhinos, giant trees and
mountain torrents reign supreme. But long may
that day be withheld, and long may it be before
those who have tired of the mockery of the
modern world have no fastness to repair to
where they may lead the life of the Stone Age
with all its joys of unshackled liberty.
Here, too, roams the prowling lordly lion.
Often I heard his majestic roar reverberate and
echo and re-echo from one towering escarpment
to another, and then the voice would die away
to a great sob, and silence absolute and utter
would reign supreme again. Let me try to con¬
jure up for you some vision of a lion’s life story,
a brief history of animal omnipotence. Consider
then the birth of Baby Leo in this far-away
corner of the earth. Consider Mother Lion and
her progeny.
Naturally enough she was very proud of
the two little cubs. She licked them, pushed
them round and round with her nose and
purred over them with maternal satisfaction.
Truly they were handsome little animals, and
one would scarcely imagine that such soft-looking,
lovable creatures could ever grow up to become
the terrors of man and beast for many scores of
miles round their haunts. Their home was in a
little, rocky cavern on the southern slopes of the

Chinicoatali Mountains. There was little animal
life in the mountains, but at the foot of the
slopes a pretty little river which gathered its
waters from the torrents of the range coursed
leisurely along, and here eland, zebra, roan
antelope, and bush-buck drank in the early
morning and again at dusk. The lioness found
no great difficulty, therefore, in finding meat for
herself, and although the birth of the cubs and
their subsequent nourishment demanded that
she should be exceptionally well fed, she was
seldom hungry. Sometimes she hunted alone
and sometimes she was accompanied by her
mate, a magnificent lion in the best years of his
life, with a great, tawny mane and a voice that
would make music through all the rocky fastnesses
of the mountains. But he was a gentleman of
uncertain habits. Sometimes he would return
to the lair in the first hour of sunlight, but often
he wandered away to the grassy plains by the
river and fell asleep amongst the tall, dense
grass bordering an ant-heap. Many weeks elapsed
before the cubs accompanied their parents on
their nocturnal excursions, but they soon learned
to imitate the stealthy, cat-like prowl of their
father and mother.
Their father had shown them how to earn a
meal in a manner which had impressed them
greatly. He had crept up behind a great bull
eland one evening just as the noble old animal
was lowering his muzzle in the water for his
usual sundown fill. Suddenly the lion sprang
right on to the eland’s withers, and his claws
dug right into his sides, and before the old bull
could even dash in abject terror into the river,
the lion had fastened his teeth deep into the back
of his neck, and with one savage, powerful bite
had brought the great antelope down. It was
all so wonderfully silent and sudden that the
cubs who were crouching by their mother scarcely
realized that their sire had secured several
hundredweight of rich, fat meat in those momen¬
tous seconds. But there the eland lay, and a
minute afterwards his great, ox-like body was
being torn in pieces by the cruel claws and long,
strong teeth. The first blushes of daybreak were
stealing across the eastern sky before the lions
decided that they had eaten their fill for one
night. Seven or eight hungry jackals were
patiently sitting around the carcase, on which
a considerable amount of meat still remained.
Late one afternoon the two young lions awoke
from their slumbers to find that their mother
had deserted them; clearly she considered that
they were now old enough to look after them¬
selves. She was not mistaken, and for months
the pair hunted together. Game was abundant,
and they grew in strength and experience day
by day. Of course the time came when they,
too, found their mates, and like all the rest of
creation their ties of blood kinship were weakened
when they took unto themselves the cares and
affections of fatherhood. In short, the brothers
separated, and we shall in future have to follow
the fortunes of but one of them.
The life of the larger of the two was the
more eventful, and we will, therefore, see how
he fared in the sterner years of his life. One
morning he returned to the cave in which he
and his mate had taken up their abode to find
that she had presented him with two fine cubs.
But he took very little interest in his offspring

—indeed he was a most undutiful parent—and
a few days after the birth of the cubs he forsook
her and wandered away on his own account.
In a few months he had roamed nearly to Lake
Mweru. Sometimes he had hunted with other
wandering lions, and sometimes he had killed
entirely on his own account. Several adventures
had befallen him, and one certainly calls for
mention, for it was really the turning-point of
his career. One dark night he was prowling
around on the banks of the Chambezi River with
three other lions. They had hunted there for
many days and the game was very wary, so an
old lion suggested a little strategy. Leo Major
wandered away from the river, and the lion of
this little story and his two companions crouched
down by its banks. Presently the old lion
roared and roared until the air seemed to vibrate.
A great troop of zebra heard his roars and got
his wind—-the old lion had carefully studied
wind before he commenced roaring. They
stampeded with snorts and barks of terror and
rushed straight into the jaws of the three lions
ambushed by the river. Our friend had pulled
down a fine old stallion, and when Leo Major
came down to the Chambezi and wanted to
share the spoil, he keenly resented the intrusion.
A terrible fight ensued, and our friend got badly
bitten through a leg and the back of his neck,
and was also unfortunate enough to run a sharp
thorn up into the tender pad of his foot in the
fracas. Several days he lay in the shade of a great
rock and none came to comfort or tend him.
Gradually his leg and neck wounds healed up,
but the foot festered and, though ravenously
hungry, he was wholly unable to catch game.

Fate enters into the lives of wild animals just as
it sways the destinies of mankind; the minor
incidents are productive of most momentous
results. Had it not been for that evil little
thorn, our feline acquaintance would in all
probability have been content to remain on an
antelope or a zebra diet. As it was, he limped
a few miles to a native village one night, and
just before dawn he stole a goat. The next
night all the goats had been driven into huts,
but he seized a native woman early the next
morning, and the taste of human blood and
flesh appealed strongly to his palate. To-day
he is the terror of the Lake Mweru region. His
foot has at last healed up, and he is a great,
shaggy-maned animal, a confirmed man-eater,
daring, cunning and resourceful, for he has
never forgotten the delicious taste of his
first human meal.
When the fires have burned down in the
villages and his low hunting grunt breaks the
silence of the African night many an Awemba
moves unsteadily around his hut and seizes his
spear in an agony of fear, and he may well be
excused, for there is no more terrible foe in the
whole wide world than a man-eating lion seeking
whom he may devour.
And now away to another realm of solitude

distant several days’ journey to the west of the
great valley, where the lions roar and the rhino
pushes his ponderous way through the thorn
belts. I write of the call of the swamps that
surround Lakes Bangweolo and Mweru.
Every different portion of this world has its
peculiar fascination. The rugged grandeur of

mountain ranges, the placid peace of lakes and
rivers, the strenuous life of a busy city have
each their very own attractions. It is perhaps
difficult to imagine that the desire to return to
the interminable sands of a desert could become
real in civilized man, or that the monotony of
the great, dreary swamps of Central Africa could
ever call one back to those solitudes of disease
and unending desolation. And yet there is an
indefinable something in those melancholy marsh
lands, a subtle fascination which bites into one’s
very soul, and creates a strange longing when
the roar of modern life is at its loudest once again
to hear the night winds sighing through the reeds
of the Bangweolo and Mweru swamps. Once
again one sees the treacherous sudd rising and
falling like the billows of the ocean, once again
one hears the mournful cries of the fisher birds
as they hover over one of the backwaters of
Luchya, and the realization that they are but
remembrances of the past produces an insatiable
desire to make them of the present.
Picture to yourself an illimitable stretch of
reeds and evil-smelling pools where the water
is iridescent and the fever fiends revel in their
ideal haunts. As far as the eye can see there
is nothing but marsh and mire. The hot, murky
sky seems to blend with the all-pervading
monotony of the marshes, so that there is no
real sky-line, merely a blur in the distance where
the rank vegetation and the stagnant pools
merge with the heavens. Far away to the east
are the plains which fringe the swamps, vast
and dreary expanses where there is but little
water, and where one may see in the heat of
noon the tantalizing vision of an inviting, crystal-
pure pool shimmering in the sunshine, away on
the far horizon, a mirage of Bangweolo.
These great marsh lands, upon which David
Livingstone was the first white man to gaze,
are by no means devoid of animal life. Right
in their depths there dwells a primitive low
type of people named the Wa-Unga. They are
hideously ugly, and the majority of them seem
to be afflicted with sleeping sickness or syphilis.
Nearly every Wa-Unga it was my lot to come
in contact with had some terrible affection of
the eyes; they were either distorted and blood¬
shot or had else been put out by the Awemba,
who, I believe, a few years ago, never lost an
opportunity of mutilating any member of these
curious people who was so unfortunate as to
come into contact with the savage lords of this
part of Central Africa.
Little islands in the swamps afford the Wa-
Unga dry land whereon to build their huts and
sow their crops. The backwaters abound with
fishes, which are caught in well-woven nets, and
these enter extensively into the diet of the
swamp-dwellers. In places the marshes are
intersected in every direction by channels cut
by the Wa-Unga through the reeds. Every
settlement possesses a large number of dug-outs,
and where there are two or three Wa-Unga
villages situated close together, the scene in the
early morning, when the natives are punting
innumerable fishing canoes through the maze
of channels to the open water is suggestive of a
savage Venice.
This is the habitat of that most handsome
antelope, the black lechwe, and here too the
shy situtunga splashes through the morass at

evening to feed on the grass lands which fringe
the villages. Occasionally you may see his
characteristic hoof-print in the mud where terra
firma abuts on the marshes, but you will be
fortunate if you catch a glimpse of him, for he
is a consistent night feeder, and in the daytime
he wanders through the dense reeds. If dis¬
turbed he will dash right into a deep pool, and
will remain there with just his nostrils protruding
above the water until danger is past.
This then is a region which for all time will
remain a sanctuary of Nature, consecrated to
barbaric solitude. No iron horse can cross those
heaving sudds, no modern methods of navigation
are likely to disturb the peace of the dismal
waters. The black hand of pestilence has been
brought down on the marshes, and the white
man who enters the realm of the rank reeds
can account himself fortunate if he does not
contract malignant fever. There also is the
dread Palpalis, the agent of transmission in that
living death which is known as sleeping sickness.
Creative forces have reared up great barriers
to advance there, and jealously do they guard
the deep waters of the twin lakes. It is this
sense of the awful ability of Nature which
constitutes much of the curious charm of the
Central African swamps. Even the glories of
the dawn and the joy of realizing that a night
of discontent, when sleep has been banished
from tired eyes by a myriad of insect pests, has
passed cannot dispel the insistent melancholia
which has taken deep root throughout that great
waste. But there is fascination in the melan¬
choly just as there is in joy. Silence and solitude
have their charms. They are more deep-seated
than those associated with the noises of closely
packed humanity, and no one who has watched
the daybreak over the great swamps can wholly
banish from his mind the incomprehensible sense
of content with mournful monotony that has
shrouded him in a miasma of lonely satisfaction.
CHAPTER VIII
NYASALAND AND THE LOWER ZAMBESI : A COLONY

OF TRIBULATIONS AND AN EAST COAST GOLGOTHA
At the end of 1909 I arrived in Fort Jameson

on my way back to South Africa. It was
extremely difficult to obtain any 44 tenga-tengas,”
as nearly all the natives were working in their
gardens, and when I received an offer from the
Government to engage thirty-seven boys pro¬
ceeding to Blantyre to bring back cotton seed,
I immediately decided to take myself and my
trophies back by that route.
If one enters the Nyasaland Protectorate from
North-Eastern Rhodesia, the grip that Mission
work has obtained on the country quickly
manifests itself, for at Magwero, close to the
frontier, is an outpost of the Dutch Reformed
Church.
Different people have different views on mission
work in Africa, and I can scarcely believe that
my opinions on the subject would altogether
coincide with those of the Magwero Mission.
So long as England and the other great civilized
countries of the world have their slum cities with
their unutterable squalor and misery and poverty,
all African mission stations must remain as monu¬
ments to our own heartlessness, our own criminal
disregard for that old saying into which is
crammed a wealth of worldly logic and kindness—
charity begins at home.
I but ask you to visualize for a moment two
121
pictures. The one a cruel wintry night and the
Thames Embankment; the other a typical Central
African village basking in the warmth of God's
sunshine. And to whom would you accord your
charity, to whom should you accord your charity
—the cold, miserable wretches shivering in the
pallid glare of the street lamps, staring into the
rain puddles, without food, without shelter, more
awful still, without hope, or the well-fed, lazy
and contented natives of Africa who have food
and shelter and the supreme comfort of knowing
that all their wants and desires are not difficult
of gratification? It is unbecoming of nations
that have waxed wise in worldly wisdom to talk
of Higher Ideals. Look at the two pictures fairly
and squarely. Disabuse your mind of all the
sorry creeds of hypocrisy that are hurled at you
from Tabernacles. To whom should you give—
those of your own race, perhaps of your own
kith and kin, who have fallen by the wayside,
often through no fault of their own, or to the
man with the black skin who lives in another
World and has no need of your Christianity or
your charity ?
Do you think that the African native will be
improved by the dinning of religious precepts
into his ears? I know that he is not. Ascribe
it to ignorance, to narrow-mindedness, to what
you will, but I am convinced that the African
in his raw state is a far finer character and a
far happier personage than the African with a
prayer-book in his right hand and the tools of
murder in his left. Ask any man who has lived
in uncivilized Africa or who has travelled through
the byways, who makes the finer, more loyal
servant, the mission boy or the raw savage
straight from his elysian kraals ?
NYASALAND AND LOWER ZAMBESI 123
Do you imagine that the native appreciates

the efforts of missionaries who endeavour to
teach him the dangerous ethics of the doctrine
of equality ? Do you imagine that such a
gospel should receive our sane and reasoned
endorsement ? I have another picture in my
mind’s eye, and as it may illustrate my points
far better than any long-drawn-out denunciations
of missions and mission work, I shall endeavour
to portray it on the canvas of this chapter, for
it is a representative picture of Nyasaland—our
Mission Colony.
A man stood bare-headed on one of the little
islets of the Lake—bareheaded, though the sun
was high in the heavens and the heat seemed
to wither the very trees and scorch the stubbles
of the rank grass which had survived the fury
of a bush fire. There was no shade to protect
the thin gray hairs, or the stern, wearied face,
or the muscular chest, arms and legs. For this
man was naked save for a piece of white calico
wrapped round his loins. A silver crucifix hung
round his bronzed neck and a pair of well-worn
boots covered his feet; otherwise you might
have thought he was a raw African savage, whose
skin had been bleached in the scintillating rays
which shot off the face of the waters.
Around him seated, legs akimbo, were a score
of natives clad as he was save the boots, for
they all wore calico and crucifixes. The white
man was speaking to them earnestly and fervently.
He pointed to the east and to the west, and
then to the fire in heaven which glowed above
him. The natives gazed on him with looks
half-curious; awe, doubt and amazement were
mingled with respect and poor appreciation.
For he spoke to them of a salvation they could
not understand, of a penance they did not
know and a life they could not realize. Yet
when he held the cross before them they fumbled
with the bootlaces and elephant hairs which
secured those sacred symbols to their necks, and
gazed in savage admiration on the pretty play¬
things the white man had given them.
The missionary, for such he was, spoke their
language fluently, and presently he pronounced
a blessing on them, which was met with a series
of meaningless grunts, and then he turned towards
a well-built little hut and let himself into his
tropical manse.
His was a character of great strength—fanatic
power. He had renounced the world outside
as much as Charles Reade’s 44 Hermit of Gouda 55
had renounced Holland; but instead of robins
to feed he sowed mealies for the sick of his
people, and instead of carving texts on the
hard rock he gave forth Bibles and crucifixes.
Years ago he had been an athlete and a boxer.
He was still a member of the Church militant
in the most literal sense of the term, as an old
trader who a month before had rated him for
his madness, insulted his teaching, and cursed
his methods had cause to remember. Now, his
object in life was not to act the sporting vicar
in far-away England, nor to brighten the slums
of great cities where words and acts of Christian
charity are so sorely needed, but to convert the
mind of the savage to the doctrine of the Church
and to bestow his charity on them. And they
needed neither his teaching nor his unselfishness.
It was seven years now since he had first set
eyes on the waters of the lake. At first he had
worn clothes, but when he saw ten thousand
happy natives clad in calico—or in some instances
in their own black skins only—he thought they

would be happier in his own raiment, so he gave
it to them. Ten thousand happy natives without
a religion, and he thought they would be better
for Christianity, so he taught it them—or tried to.
He had been much shocked one day to learn
of the killing of the forty wives of the paramount
chief of the Awemba, when that estimable person’s
soul had left his mud-walled hut. Horror and
pity had seized him at a later date when he
heard of the mutilations which were the punish¬
ments in the stern moral code of that tribe. He
shuddered, as you and I would shudder, when
he heard that a woman had been deprived of
her left breast as the penance for adultery.
One day his travels brought him to a village
where there was a man without eyes, lips, nose,
ears or hands. He gasped in horror as you and
I would gasp at this awful, pitiful object. He
had stolen the chief’s goats, they told him.
Such knowledge, such sights girded him with
further strength for his fight against heathen
darkness.
He waged a crusade against such atrocities,
and then the Administration stepped in and
stamped out this great blot on the domain of
a Christian Power. And the missionary gave
these people crucifixes. Crucifixion was a
new form of torture and anguish to them, but
the noble mind of their pastor did not for a
moment dream of the misdirection of his act.
When the far-distant Bishop of this Equatorial
See heard that his hermit priest had no clothes
to wear he sent him up white duck suits and a
clerical gown, for Godfrey Lazembe was no
fanatic. But the garments went the way of
his earlier raiments. Never was there more
unselfish humiliation, and it is to be trusted
that there never will be again. The well-
meaning missionary of the Word in dark places
not only preached that all men are equal, and
that the white man is but a brother of the
black, but he practised it. His whole-hearted—
I had written “ mania ’’—and in the absence of
a more charitable word with a similar meaning
it must stand—absorbed him so that I suppose
he never for one moment thought of the mighty
power of the machinery, the cogwheels of which
he was oiling with such infinite care.
The inevitable wave of civilization sweeps on,
and those who do not shirk the ordeal of peering
into the future can see dark clouds on the distant
horizon. Unless the world stands still—and it
cannot do that—those clouds must some day
burst upon us. We cannot escape them, but
that is no reason why we should precipitate the
storm.
In his true uncultured self the African native
is a character in which there is much to commend.
Fill his shallow brain, however, with thoughts
which are altogether beyond him, teach him a
doctrine, the principles of which he cannot
assimilate, and he loses most, if not all, of his
natural charms, and he inevitably cultivates at
the same time vices which he did not practise
before he gave up his calico for a pair of trousers
and an umbrella.
But to return for a moment to the lonely
priest. There is not much more to say of his
life, and I shall therefore record his death.
Like many another he gave up his life to his
cause. Blackwater fever seized him one day,
and in twenty-four hours he was stark and
cold.
NYAS ALAND AND LOWER ZAMBESI 127
His natives buried him in a shallow pit in the

bush. The same night the drums were beaten
loudly, there was a big dance in the village, and
much native beer was drunk, as is their custom
on the decease of a great man.
A dozen miles or so from Magwero one

crosses the Bua River and comes on quite a
different establishment to Magwero, an outpost
of the British Army instead of the Christian
religion.
Modern Nyasaland has passed through many
days of war, and a military force of importance
is maintained in the Protectorate. Over twenty
years ago the Arabs resisted the growth of
British influence around the waters of Nyasa
by arms and battle, and, after their advance
down the lake had been stayed by a handful
of Britishers and their power had been broken
in Eastern Central Africa, the work of subduing
one or two powerful native tribes had to be
undertaken. Of these the Yaos and the Angoni
(descendants of the old Zulu fighting stock which
earned for Tchaka, M’Zilikazi and Lobengula the
reputations of black Neros) gave most trouble,
but at length their anarchy was broken, and
this part of Africa was given over to the white
man, the reward of years of toil and fighting
and exploration. Fort Jameson now stands
close to the old slaughter kraals of M’Pezeni—the
great Angoni king—and to this day the capital
of North-Eastern Rhodesia is commonly spoken
of amongst the natives as “ M’Pezeni.” As for
the Yaos, they have settled down to the arts
of peace instead of war, and their intelligence,
physique and courage make them most valuable
assets of the Lake Protectorate. There are no
braver natives in Africa than the Yaos. They
have their faults, of course, but a good Yao
servant is a possession to be treasured as a gem
of great worth.
The founding of Nyasaland was thus not
achieved without the spilling of much blood,
and it is deemed necessary to maintain a military
force in the country, for the Nyasaland Adminis¬
tration not only guards its own territory, but at
the time of which I write, assumed responsibility
for the peace of North-Eastern Rhodesia as well.
And so there are numerous forts scattered through¬
out the territory. Fort Manning is one of these
—a military post pure and simple, with a young
British officer in command. About sixty-nine
miles south-east of Fort Manning lies Lilongwe,
an administrative post or Boma.
Between these two places there is little of
much interest to be observed. The road to
Blantyre, a well-beaten native track running
down its centre, the sides weed-clad, winds
through Achipata villages, past rest-houses,
across green “ dambos,” and through many
small forests. Occasionally the sight of game
breaks the monotony of the tramp, and I well
remember swearing at two fine sable antelope
bulls that I saw close to the road. One of
them indeed was a magnificent creature. I had
no licence to shoot in Nyasaland, and, more¬
over, my ammunition was finished, after my
three and a half months’ hunting in the Luangwa
Valley and towards Lake Bangweolo, and so I
had to stand and gaze in regretful admiration as
the antelope bounded across the road into the
bush. The sun glinted on his grand scimitar¬
shaped horns, thrown back nearly to his withers,
and I longed to get a sight on him, for he carried

a truly magnificent head.
The country hereabouts is fairly densely popu¬
lated, and the main road leads past large numbers
of kraals, the majority of the inhabitants being
Achipata and Achewa, whilst a few Angoni and
Yao are occasionally met with.
The Nyasaland Administration takes every
care of its native population, for it is, of course,
not only an obligation on Great Britain to take
up the white man’s burden in Nyasaland, as
she has done in other parts of Africa, but the
population of this Central African Protectorate
is great in comparison to the size of the country,
and contributes a very large percentage of the
revenue in the shape of hut taxes—in one recent
year nearly 43 per cent, of Nyasaland’s income
was contributed directly by the natives. Then,
too, much of the transport work of the country
—particularly in Angoniland, where there are
neither railways, lakes, nor navigable rivers—is
done by natives. The system of native ad¬
ministration in vogue in the Lake Protectorate
is good, although there are one or two directions
in which reform might well be instituted. For
instance, Native Commissioners and Assistant
Native Commissioners might, one would think,
be spared the ghastly task of personally super¬
intending the hanging of murderers.
The average Englishman of good family and
custom—and this type represents the average
Nyasaland official—naturally thoroughly dreads
such duties—and I cannot see why he should
not be excused from undertaking these gruesome
tasks. It is quite right that native murderers
should meet the extreme penalty of the law
in the magisterial area in which the deed was
committed.
If all were sent to Zomba, the natives in a
far-away district where a murder had been
committed would lose sight of the murderer,
but they might or might not realize what punish¬
ment had been meted out to him, and the
execution would in all probability have no in¬
fluence on the murderer’s neighbours, and much
of the significance of British law and justice
would be lost on the native mind. But surely it
would not be difficult to obtain the services of
a professional hangman, who would visit the
different gaols of the country and perform his
duties, scarcely those of Native Commissioners.
Lilongwe is a prettily situated little place
with the Lilongwe River, which rises in Portu¬
guese territory and flows into Nyasa, running
through the station. After leaving Lilongwe
one gets some fine views of the mountains and
hills of the Angoni plateau.
All the way from Lilongwe to Tetie the
country west of the main road is a game reserve,
and here very large numbers of elephant roam.
Occasionally permission is granted to shoot one
or two in the reserve, and I have been told that
some little while ago no less than six were
killed there in twenty minutes.
Tetie is the headquarters of the W.N.L.A.* in
this part of Africa, and from here large numbers
of natives are recruited for work in the mines
of the Main Reef. Here one is no great distance
from the Portuguese boundary, whilst the main
road from Dedza to Fort Melangeni either passes
through a portion of Portuguese East Africa or
runs right along the border. The Dedza Boma
# Witwatersrand Native Labour Association.
WART HOG; BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA ON ULENDO ; BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA
is one of the highest stations, if not the highest

station, in the whole Protectorate. It nestles
at the foot of Dedza Mountain, from the top
of which a good view to Lake Nyasa can be
obtained at favourable times of the year, Dedza
is a well-laid-out station, surrounded by plenty
of trees, and it needs them, for cold winds blow
over the crest of the hill on which the Boma
has been built, and in winter Dedza would, I
should imagine, be anything but tropical. Dedza
is in the heart of Angoniland, and these fine
savages, descendants of the old Zulu stock,
endowed with many of the Zulu virtues, and yet,
because Nyasaland is further off the trail of the
cosmopolitan concession hunter, questionable
trader, and other attributes of civilization than
is Natal and Zululand, without many of the
modern Zulu vices, are to be found around here
in great numbers. The native population in the
vicinity of Dedza, N’Cheu, and the mission
stations around Dombole is very large, and it is
not to be wondered at that the Wit water sr and
and Rhodesian Native Labour Associations have
designs on Angoniland.
Leaving Dedza one crosses some flat, open
country to Fort Melangeni, a military post
manned by Sikhs with an Indian “ jemadar ”
in charge. As in British East Africa and
Uganda, so in Nyasaland has our Indian Empire
had a considerable amount to do with the
foundation of our East African Colonies. The
first military force in the Protectorate consisted
of 200 Sikhs, and throughout the history of
British Central Africa their names are honourably
enscrolled. The military force proper of the
Protectorate, however, now consists of a battalion
of the King’s African Rifles, a native force
formed by the late Colonel Edwards and General
Sir William Manning5 which has been tried and
not found wanting in many parts of Africa.
At Dombole, a beautiful station of the Zambesi
Industrial Mission Society, all kinds of fruit,
coffee, and rubber are being grown. The N’Cheu
Boma is situated about five miles from Dombole,
and is a very prettily laid out administrative post;
indeed, it is not too much to say that all the
Bomas in Nyasaland—all that I saw, at any rate
—are real beauty patches in a country which
possesses its full share of typically grand and
picturesque African scenery.
Until I had reached the Dombole mission I
had walked the whole way from Salisbury to
the fringe of the Bangweolo marshes, through
Tete, Fort Jameson and M’Pika, and the whole
of the way from this Bangweolo country to
Dombole—a journey which, with the hunting
tramps undertaken in different parts, involved
a total distance of well over 2000 miles.
Illness, however, had rendered me so weak,
and the repeated doses of medicine containing
opium had made me so sleepy, that, after
leaving the mission, I got my 44 tenga-tengas 55
to make a “ macliilla55 out of a stretcher bed, and
in this I was carried into Blantyre. From N’Cheu
to Rivi Rivi, where the African Lakes Corpora¬
tion has a tobacco plantation, is about thirteen
miles, and eight miles farther on the Kapene
River was reached—the only healthy-looking
river to be found just before the rains in this
part of the territory until one reaches the Shire.
Even the Shire was scarcely entitled to the
distinction of a river in December, when I
crossed it, for the water did not reach the knees
of my u machilla ” men. The rains were excep-
tionally late, the rivers were all low, and water

scarce all over the Protectorate. But if there
was not much water in the Shire there were
plenty of mosquitoes hovering around it, and
the night I spent by its banks at Matope was a
bad one indeed. The next day I passed through
the Lirangwe cotton and tobacco estate, and
reached Blantyre the day after, only to find that I
had just missed steamer connection down the river.
Blantyre, the commercial capital of the Shire
Highlands, is certainly a town, as towns go in
Central and East Africa. It is chiefly note¬
worthy on account of its beautiful cathedral,
built by the late Dr. Ruffel-Scott, and because
of Mandala, the business suburb of Blantyre
proper, which constitutes the headquarters of
the African Lakes Corporation in Africa. At
Blantyre, too, is the terminus of the Shire
Highlands railway, so that the place is one of
very considerable importance.
The great problem of Nyasaland is the question
of transport. In the earlier days of British
Central Africa, communication with the coast
was effected by means of the Shire and Zambesi
rivers. With one or two small breaks—the
Murchison Cataracts near Katungas, a few miles
south-east of Blantyre, being the only really
formidable obstacles—communication by means
of these rivers was maintained between Lake
Nyasa and the Indian Ocean during the greater
part of the year without difficulty. Such a
method of transport had naturally much to be
said for it. It was cheap, no great capital
charges were involved, and the efficiency of the
service was by no means bad. Of recent years,
however, Lake Nyasa has sunk many feet. The
Shire is merely an overflow pipe from Nyasa,
receiving contributary streams of no great im¬
portance en route, the Ruo, which unites with
the Shire at Chiromo, constituting the most
important of these.
That year the rains had been very late, and
this, combined with the fact that the water in
the tank of Nyasa had been exceptionally low,
brought about entire disorganization of the
river service. The Shire Highlands railway was
constructed from Chiromo to Blantyre to facili¬
tate transport, and at a later date the railway
was extended from Chiromo to Port Herald,
thirty miles nearer the coast, on the Shire River,
as the water above Port Herald became so low
that the steamers could not at certain times of
the year reach Chiromo.
But things seem to have gone from bad to
worse, and at the time of writing, the large river
steamers were unable to proceed above Villa
Bocage. Only the smallest boat of the B.C.A.
Co.’s flotilla could proceed to N’Temia, and
N’Temia must be something like nine miles from
Villa Bocage. Between Port Herald and N’Temia
or Villa Bocage communication is now maintained
by small house-boats, and even with craft of
this description drawing only a few inches of
water it is a matter of great difficulty to reach
Villa Bocage, the real head of perennially navi¬
gable water. It is here that the influence of the
Zambesi is felt; indeed, for some miles above
N’Temia the back-waters of the Zambesi are
travelled on with but a very small contribution
from the Shire. Nyasaland is therefore in need
of better means of communication with the
coast. The present crude and costly method of
combining land with railway, lake and river
transport, and the expense and time involved
in reloading and transhipment in barges, house¬

boats, small and large stern-wheelers, puts a
heavy tax on the industry of the country.
Nyasaland nowhere touches the coast, but until
there is direct railway communication between
the south end of Lake Nyasa and Villa Bocage,
or, better still, with the Indian Ocean, the
Protectorate cannot be expected to give evidence
of her real wealth. Chinde, too, is an unsatis¬
factory port—it is rapidly being swallowed up
by the sea—and Quilimane, or some other place
on the coast, will probably have to, some day
in the near future, take upon itself the responsi¬
bilities of the commerce of much of South Central
and East Africa. By the Anglo-Portuguese Con¬
vention of 1891 the Zambesi was proclaimed a
neutral waterway, but Port Herald is the most
southerly station of the Protectorate, and, as
things are constituted in Africa at present,
extension of the Shire Highlands railway to the
coast will have to be performed in the territory
of a foreigner. Recently construction of a line
from Beira to tap the Protectorate has been
agreed on, so that improved transport conditions
may be looked for in the near future.
The Shire Highlands Railway is 114 miles long
and has cost over a million sterling, or close on
£10,000 per mile, a price approximating closely
to that of the Uganda Railway, which is between
500 and 600 miles in length and took six mil¬
lions sterling out of the pockets of British tax¬
payers. But the Shire Highlands Railway was
an even more difficult line to build than that
which runs from Mombasa to Victoria Nyanza.
All materials had to be conveyed up the rivers
from the coast, and Port Herald is 210 miles
from fast-disappearing Chinde. This line was
built by private enterprise, so the people of
England had not to put their hands in their
pockets for the benefit of a far-away colony.
Perhaps no railway line in the world was con¬
structed under greater difficulties. It is on the
3 ft. 6 in. gauge, and may be truly said to begin
nowhere and end nowhere. It is just one link
in a commercial chain which will have to be
forged in full if we are to reap the real benefits
of the Nyasaland harvest. Like the Uganda
Railway, wood fuel is used, and the majority
of the station-masters, engine-drivers, etc. are
Indians, of whom there are large numbers in the
Protectorate.
There are some pretty bits of true, typical
African scenery along the Shire Highlands line,
but from a spectacular point of view it can in
no wise compare with the Uganda Railway. There
are no grand, snow-capped peaks like Kilimanjaro
or Kenia to be viewed, no expansive views like
that which one obtains from the top of the Ki¬
kuyu Escarpment across the Great Rift Valley, no
wonderful zoological sights such as the Athi and
Kapiti plains afford. Five miles from Blantyre
the high station of Limbi is reached, where the
railway headquarters and workshops are situated.
Mikolongwe, Luchenza, and M’Lange Road are
passed, and then the train steams into Chiromo,
situated at the confluence of the Shire and Ruo
rivers in country covered with stately palms.
Near Chiromo is the Elephant Marsh Reserve,
which affords sanctuary to a very large number
of buffaloes. Chiromo was at one time the base
of the railway and a very important place—as
important places go in Central Africa. Now it
is given over almost entirely to banyan traders,
and the climate of both this place and Port
Herald, thirty miles farther on, is certainly

better suited to Asiatics than to men with white
skins. Both places are veritable burning fiery
furnaces during the greater part of the year.
Port Herald must indeed be accounted one of
the warmest places on earth. One hundred and
eighteen in the shade or more has been known at
this, the most southerly station of the Colony,
and needless to state, officials of the Protectorate
ordered to Port Herald experience some of the
feelings of the Nihilist banished to Siberia. But
Britain has assumed the white man’s burden
here, and she must not grumble if some of her
sons get scorched and fever-ridden. At Chiromo
the river is crossed by a bridge 420 feet long
and founded on screw piles, and at Port Herald
I said good-bye to the Shire Highlands Railway,
and, embarking on a little house-boat with a
crew of ten boys, set off down the river.
Where there were a few inches of water, my
dusky sailors pontooned with long bamboo poles,
and where there was little or practically no
water, they got into the bed of the Shire and
pushed and pulled the house-boat over the sands.
Ere long darkness came on, and then a tremen¬
dous thunder-storm and a little rain. The air
felt like molten metal, and as the brilliant light¬
ning flashed over the troubled but shallow waters
of the river, and the native villages on the banks,
I began to appreciate some of the transport
difficulties of Nyasaland at their true worth.
Until daylight my boys pontooned and tugged,
their lusty river chants making weird music in
the wild night.
By dint of much punting, pulling and pushing,
I reached N’Temia the next day, where I found
the Scorpion, stern-wheeler, and the oldest
steamer on the river. Close to N’Temia the
great mass of Mount Moramballa rears itself up
from the low-lying bush country, and this
mountain has, I was told, been viewed from
the coast, although I should hardly think it
possible.
It was somewhere in this country that, not so
very many years ago, the warlike Massengere
lived, a people who seem to have altogether
disappeared from the face of the land, as more
than one other tribe in this mysterious Africa
has done.
At Villa Bocage I found the Centipede, another
stern-wheeler of the British Central Africa Com¬
pany, substantially larger than the Scorpion, and
drawing twenty-two or twenty-three inches of
water. An agent of the British Central Africa
Company and a Portuguee constitute the white
population of Villa Bocage, but a little farther
down the river there is quite a little British
colony—consisting of three—planting cotton for
the Companhia da Zambezia on Pompona Island.
It is in byways of the world like Pompona that
one meets the greatest wanderers, not in the
crowded thoroughfares of big cities with scientific
and geographical institutions. Men who have
travelled across a continent generally have a
way of burying themselves somewhere in its
recesses where the world knows them not.
There is such a one on Pompona, a man who
seems to know Africa from the south to the
Masai steppes, and who told me that he had
wandered from German East Africa across to
Lake Chad, and then through the Congo to
the Luangwa River ! Down the river steamed
the Centipede (her skipper often troubled by
sandbanks and stony bottoms); on past the
NY AS ALAND AND LOWER ZAMBESI 139
confluence of the Zambesi and the Shire, and

on to Chimbwe of the Sena sugar factory.
There is much in this journey to delight the
eye and interest the mind, and to one who had
walked 2,200 miles, and had not lived on the
fat of the land for several months past because
most of the land had no fat to offer, it was a
sublime luxury to have good water to drink and
food to eat, and to lazily lounge in a deck-chair
and watch the bush-clad land with its moun¬
tainous background glide past in the warm
sunshine.
Scores of pure white rice-birds—the “ Paddy
birds ” of India—flew past, native dug-outs
pushed along the great mother stream of South-
Eastern Africa, occasionally a school of hippos
or a wicked-looking crocodile would rise in front,
and then, hearing the swish of the stern-wheels,
would sink and come up again a long way behind.
Navigating the Zambesi is indeed a fine art.
There are channels and sand-spits, stony bottoms
and currents, and long experience alone can
pilot a steamer down such a tricky waterway.
At the confluence of the Shire and Zambesi
the Centipede got on sand, and only after a good
deal of manoeuvring and pontooning did the
stern-wheeler and her four attendant barges
carrying cotton, tobacco, firewood, etc. clear
herself and proceed to Chimbwe. In the evening
a bit of a storm came up, and again the Centipede
got on to the sand.
Lacerdonia was reached the next morning,
and a little farther on the Jesuit Mission Station
of Shupanga, where lie the remains of the wife
of the great explorer, David Livingstone. The
sugar industry, under the auspices of Messrs.
Hornung & Co., has assumed very important
proportions on the Zambesi, and shortly after
leaving Shupanga, Mopea, another factory, was
reached. Here we met the stern-wheelers Scott
of the African Lakes Corporation, Hydra of the
British Central Africa Company, and the Zambesi,
a Portuguese boat. Just at dusk a sugar com¬
pany’s boat passed us, the sparks from her wood
fires making a pretty sight in the dim light of
the great river.
The next day I had a touch of fever, occasioned,
no doubt, by a foolish swim in the Zambesi the
day before, a change of climate, and the crossing
of the African coast fever belt. I did not,
therefore, see much of the river that day, but
in the afternoon had a good view of the Mora-
maya sugar factory. The next morning we
passed the Empress, of the African Lakes Corpora¬
tion, the largest boat on the river, and shortly
afterwards sighted another stern-wheeler at the
junction of the Chinde River with the Zambesi.
There are in all about twenty-five steamers on
the river, including a couple of Portuguese
gunboats, but the greater part of the lower
Zambesi flotilla is owned by the British Central
Africa Company and the African Lakes Cor¬
poration.
Hot, sandy Chinde was soon reached. The
place is rapidly being washed away by the sea,
and when I landed there I felt that I should
not care very much if the Indian Ocean devoured
the place in one bound.
Many a homeward-bound passenger has gazed
from the deck of an East Coast liner at the
quaint little cluster of wood and iron houses
built on the shifting sands of the Zambesi Delta
which is called Chinde. If that passenger has
been of a venturesome, wandering turn of mind,
EMBARKING PASSENGERS OFF CHINDE
[To face p. 140
ROAN ANTELOPE; BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA

there has come a longing to see what manner

of place this is which lies across the troubled
swell of the bar. The ocean leviathan pitches
and rolls on the heaving waters, and a few
passengers are dropped unceremoniously over¬
board in a great wicker-work cage. They alight
on a little, tossing tug-boat and a human exchange
is effected. The cage rises and disgorges on the
liner’s decks two or three thin, sallow-faced white
men, wrecks who have gone ashore on that
great barrier reef of sickness which binds Central
Africa.
To the interested passenger these gaunt beings
lend added interest to the settlement, just visible
amidst the bush of the mainland which battles
yearly with river and tide, and, like Canute of
old, has to admit its impotency against the
powers of the supreme.
For Chinde, the Gateway of South Central
Africa, is disappearing. Countless millions of the
golden grains of the hot sand on which man has
built his feeble edifices are each year claimed
by the estuary. Where stores and bungalows
stood but a brief while ago, the flotilla of the
British Central Africa Company and the African
Lakes Corporation now ride and bask, and the
Zambesi and the Indian Ocean mingle in the
dancing sunlight. It is a pretty picture seen
through the spectacles of health, the variegated
roofs of the township, the mangrove patches,
and the tender hues of the bush all blending
with river, sea, and sky, and giving to it the
torpid touch of the tropics, the master-brush of
creation’s artist. How different does it all appear
when disease has fretted away fancy, and malady
has steeped one’s very bones in a vindictive
flight of thought against all Nature! Pass
beyond that gateway, traverse those paths which
lead into the mysterious interior, come back
fever-laden, weary and wasted, and Chinde seems
to be the hinges on which a great portal swings,
shutting out the sunlight from life, a portcullis
which guards the road to delirium and death.
For this is the Golgotha of the East Coast,
and the lands beyond are the Gethsemane of
those to whom Africa calls. That call is only
heard by certain ears, and when the invitation
comes it seldom brooks a refusal.
Time speeds by, and he who has responded
to the beckoning, wends his way seawards.
Many a traveller returning to Chinde has smelt
the salt breeze which blows across the estuary,
and drawn it deep into his nostrils as the elixir
of life. But it is often a draught of death.
There is something fatal in that blending of the
hot winds drawn from the sea and the mangrove
swamps of the coast which mixes a potent
philtre that has sent scores of worn wanderers
to their last sleep.
There are two burial-grounds in Chinde, the
new cemetery and an old graveyard. It is in
the latter place of skulls that the remains of
Stairs, who dared the darkness of the Congo
forests with Stanley, were laid to rest. Here,
too, Monteith Fotheringham, and many another
pioneer and explorer have sought the sanctuary
of the tomb unhonoured and unsung.
By right of endeavour and achievement such
spirits are entitled to a crypt in those great piles
where England buries her most revered dead.
But they were men who would have scorned
the limitations of the most titanic abbeys the
world has ever built. And so it is that their
wasted frames were buried deep in the sands
NY AS ALAND AND LOWER ZAMBESI 143
of this little East Coast port, which stands a

sentinel at the entrance to the vast, and peeps
out on the spangled surf of the illimitable.
Great Britain has her tenement of commerce
here, just as God has His acres for the worn-out
bodies of those who made that commerce
possible.
A small strip of land bounded by a palisade
stretches down to the river front. This is the
British Concession, where all goods for and from
British Central Africa are landed and stored
free of duty.
One day, perhaps, Quilimane will be the
metropolis of this part of Africa, and will boast
of a railway station and a big port, the terminus
of the extended Shire Highlands Railway. But
that can only come to pass after the patchwork
on the map of Africa has been re mended into a
more harmonious piece of cloth. And so it is
that Chinde, where the lazy Portuguese police
sleep in the sandy streets, and the British trader
watches with anxiety the irresistible advance of
ocean tide and river wavelet, plumes itself with
the mock feathers of a meagre commerce.
For twenty years a little band of officials,
traders, and adventurers have held the gateway
against malady and miasma, sand and sea, and
that is Chinde.
Some day a ragged line of painted tin shanties
will proclaim to the few who have reason to
visit Timbwe island, to which Chinde clings,
that here was a place where a few adventurers
of commerce tried to maintain a port of entry
into the heart of Africa.
God has set His seal of doom on this place.
Each little wavelet has its apportioned task to
do, and the day is not far distant when Chinde
10
will lie below golden sands and muddy ooze, as
deep as Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried
by the lava of Vesuvius. For Chinde has defied
the inexorable laws, and a house built on the
sands cannot stand.
CHAPTER IX
THE EAST COAST : A CITADEL AND A

BERYL ISLET
The East Coast of Africa may be termed a

seaboard of enlightenment on a continent of
darkness. For centuries the great interior of
the African continent was a realm of mystery
and a land of the unknown. The people of
ancient Egypt, the Romans, the Greeks, and the
Arabs often speculated on the sources of the Nile,
and sang of the grandeur of the Mountains of the
Moon, but they only knew of them vaguely.
Not so with the coast. The eastern seaboard of
Africa was well known before the birth of Christ.
All peoples, tongues and nations seem to have
visited East Africa at some time or other. The
history of the littoral from Cape Guardafui
downwards is one of tremendous interest. It is
a story of daring exploration in a savage land, of
treasure-finding and fearful loss of life, of raid
and rapine, conquest and defeat. It has taken
far more blood to write than it took England
and Spain to record the history of the Spanish
Main. What loss of life was entailed in the
exploitation of Southern Rhodesia by the
Phoenicians or the conquest of the East Coast
by the hardy old Portuguese navigators of the
sixteenth century; what quantity of gold and of
ivory has been won from the interior and trans¬
ported to the East Coast, or what number of
145
unhappy slaves were done to death in the awful
journey out to the sea, no one ever will know.
Just as Mombasa has deserved its name of
“ Island of War,” so does the whole East Coast
merit some similar title characteristic of perpetual
strife and bloody mutiny. It is hard to realize
all this to-day. It has been my lot to travel
up and down the East Coast of Africa a number
of times, and I have never yet quite been able
to realize it. Seen from the decks of a comfort¬
able modern Union-Castle or German East African
liner it all seems a land of peaceful beauty.
The old Portuguese forts at Mozambique and
Mombasa still give forth the clash of arms, but
they are the arms of peace rather than the arms
of war, merely the rifles and bayonets of the
native “ askaris,” or police boys, and it is
seldom that they have to be used save on parade.
It is indeed difficult to imagine a more restful,
sleepy, old-world port than Mozambique, once
the chief stronghold of Portugal in Africa. The
old cannon still look defiantly out to sea, and the
thick, coral-built walls still seem to throw out
a challenge: “ Scale me if you dare ! ” But
Portugal’s fortunes have changed; her glory
in East Africa to-day centres at Loureng:o
Marques and Beira, and instead of the rusty old
guns which were the pride of Vasco da Gama
and Barreto, there are the steam-driven cranes
and the trucks on the landing wharves, present-
day emblems of power.
But these modern tokens of glory, escutcheons
on the shield of commerce, lack the romance of
the olden days. I have not written this book as
a serious disquisition on trade, although shekels
have constituted the shackles that have bound so
many to Africa. As was recorded in the begin-
DELAGOA BAY I THE GATEWAY OF THE TRANSVAAL
[To face p. 146
BRONSON AND THE BEIRA EXPRESS IN SANDY BEIRA : THE GATEWAY
OF RHODESIA
THE EAST COAST 147
ning, this is but a tale of playground facts and
fancies, and if I am to continue your guide,
philosopher and friend you must hurry by
Louren^o Marques, which is the gateway of the
Transvaal and its gold, you must not tarry long
amidst the corrugated irondom of Beira, which
is the harbour of Rhodesia. Our liner does not
call at Chinde—Chinde is merely a mock port
to which only the riff-raff of navigation journey,
and if you have read aright what has already
been written in this volume anent Chinde you
will not regret the omission.
Speed away then to Mozambique with its
Citadel of the Centuries that basks in an atmo¬
sphere of yester-year’s valour. For indeed San
Sebastian was a great fortress in its day. But
that was very, very long ago. The straggling
piles of masonry that rest on the corals of the
Indian Ocean, in these strangely altered times,
are little more than a name, inscribed on a faded
banner that has not gone forth to battle for
centuries—at the best it is a penal settlement,
or a place of exile, where banished Portuguese
play at soldiering and mb epauletted shoulders
with black flesh. It is a sad thing to see a strong
man fall and make no effort to regain his feet.
It is infinitely more pathetic to read of a nation
that has been content to sleep away its manhood.
And in its days as vigorous and adventurous
blood coursed through the veins of Portugal as
ever made Greece and Rome and Spain the
masters of the world.
The deeds that Cortez and Pizarro wrought
for the kings of Aragon in the New World were
not one whit more valorous than the discoveries
and conquests of Vasco da Gama, Francisco
Homem and Barreto in Africa for the glory of
God and Portugal. There are few pages of
history drenched in more blood than the story
of the Portuguese conquests of East Africa.
Those hardy old navigators, who sailed their
gorgeous cockle-shells around the Cape, did
battle with wild tribes from the interior, Turkish
corsairs, sanguinary Sultans, monsoons and
malaria and mutiny. One can only marvel at
the sum and total of what those brave spirits
achieved. They well-nigh crossed Africa, and
even in these advanced days the man who
traverses the Last Continent has something to
sing a song about.
It is well to remember all this when one visits
Mozambique. Otherwise there is a natural in¬
clination to regard the place as a town that was
born asleep and has been content to doze through
a life of siesta. It is true that black cannons
peer out seawards, and that the colossal iron
marbles which in bygone days were no doubt
important factors in the calculation of power
are piled by the wooden carriages. But we who
have come to think in terms of Dreadnoughts
and 13*5 calibres, are inclined to scoff at these
old blunderbusses and their rusty cannon-balls.
Yet they have played their part in the tragedy
of triumph. War ! red war ! Mozambique, like
Mombasa, knew its sound as well as any citadel
on earth. For centuries this was a coast round
which blood flowed in a steady current until it
dyed much of the coral red and gory. And in
those days the fortress of San Sebastian was the
stronghold of Eastern Africa.
Autres temps, autres moeurs. Enter with me
to-day the fortress of San Sebastian. Courte¬
ously, a little Portuguese soldier, clad in khaki,
with a medal or two on his breast—I have been
THE EAST COAST 149
told that every servant of the Government who
is quartered in Mozambique for two years
receives a medal—advances and invites you.
They are a happy-go-lucky people, these Portu¬
guese. You may take photographs or make
notes, and the custodians of the gate will only
smile and roll cigarettes, and ask you to come on
the parapet and observe more. Inside there is
a great patio, or courtyard, with sullen barrack-
rooms built about it. Pigeons flutter peacefully
around. You may see them alight on those old
cannons, which were the emblems of Mars and
the force of arms, as though San Sebastian were
St. Paul’s Churchyard. Palms bow gracefully
to the soft ocean-borne breezes, ships of commerce
lie before the cannons’ mouths. It is the century
of concord. White and black they shoulder
arms together; and when one man drops his
musket with a loud crash a pigeon will fly
questioningly around the drill sergeant, and the
exercise will continue.
There is something pathetic as well as comic
about this unworthy masquerade in the grand
old fortress of San Sebastian. A drunken marine
could not defame St. Helena more. Yet there
is necessity for a show of force, however pitiful
it may be. Mozambique, through all the roll
of years, has maintained something more than
a nominal capitalship. Delagoa and Beira have
sprung up in the soil of commerce, but the stunted
old tree that Vasco da Gama planted for Portugal
to the north is still in a sense the stalwart oak
of Colonial Government. Here, at any rate, is
the Portuguese East African Portsmouth, and
the Colonial gaol where hope is denied to all
who have not long purses. And so San Sebastian
must have a garrison. Portugal sends her sons
and Africa her slaves for the “ prazos55—a prazo
is an administrative concession; the prazo-
owner is a virtual despot—that do not get
voluntary recruits, weave ropes of willingness
and send them to defend the right with strands
round their ankles.
But if you would know more about these
methods in an age when all men are free, you
must go into the interior, as I have done, and see
the full majesty of Portuguese law, as I have done.
It is no good wasting French on the custodian
at the gate, though he is ribboned and medalled,
obviously one in authority—a centurion at the
very least. He will only smile and bow, and
when you drop half-a-crown into his bronzed
palm for what in Bar-es-Salaam would be
accounted espionage, he will give a lazy salute
and drop a “ Gracias, senhor.”
Outside the fortress there is a little coralline
city where the houses are of pale blue, pink,
violescent. High, latticed windows and bad-smell¬
ing cobblestone streets, a cathedral that might be
a school with a spire; the Governor’s residence,
cool and commanding, the Eastern Telegraph
Company’s quarters, where is the seat of British
power; shipping agencies and shops wherein
are various collections of picture postcards and
the perpetual coral; these, with a Post Office
and an impressive pier, with unimpressive oil-
lamps, are the civic constituents of Mozambique.
Out on the mill-pond of the sunlit sea, lateen-
sailed boats ply a debatable trade, and little
islets, round which eddies swirl, rest on the
bosom of the Indian Ocean.
One of these islands was not so long ago a
powder-magazine, and some ruined walls tell a
tale of woe. There is a story of this Promethean
THE EAST COAST 151
rock which I would not recount were Vasco da
Gama and his gallant grandees not long since
dead. The officer in charge of the arsenal—he
had some title which is too long for memory to
grapple with-—sold various munitions of war to
all and sundry; a wholly execrable act on the
part of a, glorified powder-monkey. To his ears
there came one day dire tidings. The Governor-
General was coming to weigh the powder, count
the cartridges, muster the cannon-balls. Ruin
and disgrace stared him in the face, so he blew
up the magazine ! Ingenious, if calamitous, for
the Governor-General could then do nothing
more than pen official regrets to Lisbon.
The, tale came vividly back to me a few months
ago when I leant over the rails of an East Coast
liner, and watched the sun sink to rest behind
the battlements of San Sebastian. There was
fire in heaven, so brilliant, so glaring, that there
came to me visions of the Portuguese arsenal
commandant creeping, like Guy Fawkes, amid
the powder-kegs with a flaming torch and a
consummated devildom.
With that suddenness which is only known
where palm trees flourish and the winter is a
farce, the glare and glamour darkened into a
glow of gorgeous gold. Black shafts of night
came rushing across the burnished sky, but still
where the light of the world was dipping over
that mysterious mainland into which no Portu¬
guese dare enter, a blaze of splendour shone
through the riot of gloom and garish day. But
now the light was of silver brilliancy so dazzling
that eyes ached at the vision. An evening wind
came sighing over the waters and brought a
myriad of gentle wavelets drifting by. Two or
three white-robed dhows sped homewards like
wildfowl that fly the rivers at dusk. A few
minutes later and the stone arm of the fort was
just discernible stretching out sombre and gaunt
into the darkened waters. The last lingering
embroidery of the sunlight hung for a moment on
the spire of the cathedral, and seemed to bless
its worshippers. And then it was night, and
that silence which can only fall over the world’s
byways stifled even the lap-lap of the water
babies.
Mozambique of memory! Mausoleum of
mariners who dared the sea when the world was
thought to be a molehill! It is a sorry shame to
see you vassal at the tables of commerce, you
who once were king of conquest, a city militant
on a littoral of the Latin lords. Si diis placet,
you may regain some day the proud place you
possessed in the names of Eastern Africa. But
it will be a fame vastly different from that which
the picturesque pirates of an age that is for ever
past won as yours. For this is an age in which
the bank clerk is a far more important personage
than the buccaneer.
It is 568 miles by sea from Mozambique to
Zanzibar, a couple of days’ journey. Zanzibar
and its tributary of Pemba—those two beryl
islets that blaze in a sapphire setting—like
Mozambique, have had a momentous past. For
they, too, have shared in the strife and turmoil
of East Africa. But Zanzibar of to-day is a
vastly different place from Mozambique where
Morpheus reigns. That all-pervading Mozam¬
bique atmosphere of sweet jar niente has
been broken at the Isles of the Sultan by trade
winds wafted from Kutch and Goa and the
Persian Gulf. Lazier breezes blow down and
THE EAST COAST 158
up the coast from the ports of Portugal, from
Kilindini and Tanga and Dar-es-Salaam and
Mogdishu—that hell of burning hovels which
cries to the Indian Ocean for the cooling breath
of the deep—and the gales of modern commerce
drive before the Palace gates great hungry
liners and cargo boats from the seaports of the
North and the bays of the South. Union-Castle
steamers, Deutsche Ost-Afrika galleons of Kaiser-
dom, coal-blackened tramps—the pirates of
modern commerce—these and many other craft
have known the shop of his Highness the Sultan
as one worth patronizing in the bazaars of the
high seas. Here, too, the liners of the Messageries
Maritimes—called with some reason by seamen
the “ menagerie boats ’’—halt on their way to
Madagascar. It is a curious place, this island
of a Moslem, a cosmopolis of the East Coast,
where Bantu and Asiatic rub shoulders in the
twining, twisted streets, and squat together on
the broad slabs of the market-place.
All nations, tongues and people have had some
say in the moulding of this island. Greek
geographers knew of it before the beginning
of the Christian era. The Persians helped to
found it, and the shores of East Africa and
Zanzibar were visited by the Japanese and
Chinese about the time that William the
Conqueror was making himself Lord of England.
Nearly two centuries later, Marco Polo, the globe¬
trotter of the Middle Ages, wrote of the people of
Zanzibar : “ They are all idolaters . . . and pay
tribute to nobody.” The Arabian, Ibne Batuta,
sailed along the littoral but a few years afterwards
and cruised the archipelago. He gave the lie
direct to Marco Polo, for he found the people
46 religious, chaste and honest.” Be that as it may,
Zanzibar was a place of no little account before
the Portuguese doubled the Cape. And with the
arrival of the Portuguese began a new era in the
history of Zanzibar, a new era of blood and
sack and conquest and surrender. Cabral and
Francisco d’Almeida began the gory history.
Arabs and sheikhs and beys and corsairs drew
their fingers through the bloody trail and be¬
smeared the island and the whole sea-coast.
In 1798 a British squadron under Commodore
Blankett, which was cruising in the Eastern
seas 44 to counteract the operations of Bonaparte,
threshed up the East Coast of Africa against
the north-east monsoon and a strong current,”
and anchored somewhere off Mtoni in ten fathoms
of mud. History records that they were
64 hospitably received.” We Britons are surely
favoured ! If I mistake not, the seers of Zanzibar,
did they but know, would have rid Napoleon
and the East of Blankett and Mears, his
lieutenant!
Then the Hon. East India Co. sent the sailing
ship Ternato to leave the dangerous calling cards
of commerce on Yakuti, the Hakim or Governor.
Followed other frigates of King George, and
next the American eagle, having grown its
Republican wings, came flying over the island
like an albatross, and made Richard P. Waters
American Ambassador at the Sultan’s Court.
Half a century later, Zanzibar figured in the
treaties of Great Britain and Germany. The
proud old Sultanate became a pawn in the great
game of 44 grab ” over which the Powers still
linger, though all the counters have long since
been cornered. One of these games of politics
THE EAST COAST 155
was brought to a finale by what is known as the
Heligoland Convention, and for the past twenty-
three years the coral isles of Zanzibar and Pemba
have been under the protection of that Imperial
Mistress who has stumbled on dictatorship of
half the world.
That in brief is the history of Zanzibar. If
you would realize more fully the romance of its
past, go along N’Dia Kuu, the main thoroughfare
of the town, which extends from the Sultan’s
Palace to the new British Agency at Muanzi
Moja. Here are offices of a German shipping
line, the Customs House, a noble old Arab
archway, the English Club, the residence of
Tippoo Tib—grand old African despot of the
slave-trading days—Italian and Belgian Consul¬
ates, Cingalese shops, some of which bear
curiously familiar British names. Turn off into
Portuguese Street and you wTill find yourself in
a world of da Souzas. I should not like to say
just how many da Souzas there are in East
Africa. Zanzibar and Mombasa appear to be
full of them. They all sell exotic curios, or
scribble documents for an exotic Government, so
that one cannot classify them according to their
callings in life and gauge their numbers accord¬
ingly. You may turn down alleyways, which
in benevolence only can be termed streets, and
at every corner some new wonder will thrust
itself on you. Glorious old carved doorways,
open bazaars full of ghee and carmadon seeds,
women clad in all the colours of the spectroscope,
beggars and curio vendors, carriers of water,
carriers of wood, merchant princes with old,
crippled legs astride of fast-trotting white
Zanzibar donkeys, children from Hind, fat
negresses from the interior, proud police of the
Sultan with gorgeous daggers at rest in their
belts.
And in the middle of it all is the American
bar and the Transvaal Arms, where German and
Spanish ladies greet a wayfarer with a welcome
as warm as the soft clove-scented breezes that
blow from off the island. There is also a
reputationless sort of Japanese pagoda—a soiled
page from San Toy.
And close to all this medley of commerce and
cosmopolis, the stately cathedral proclaims the
wide-flung strength of the Church of England.
Hard by are some old Arab tombstones, monu¬
ments to the southerly advance of Islam in
days when England was burning men at the
stake for the sake of the Church.
Zanzibar, like all Mohammedan towns, is as
full of mosques as it is of beggars, but if you have
ever been in Cairo you will be vastly disappointed
at the temples of Zanzibar. For the Arabs of
the island and the ruling house are of the sect
of the Abazis, who correspond to the early
Nonconformists of our own island. It is true
that the mosque at Kunazini is lit up at times
by coloured lights, that the tabernacle next to
the Thoria Topan House is an imposing structure,
that the mosque near the Africa Hotel is re¬
splendent in white stucco. There is also a large
mosque near the Palace to which the Sultan
goes on the Feasts of Id-el-Huj and Ramadan.
But to compare these with any of the large
tabernacles of Islam that grace the lovely city of
Cairo, is to compare a Wesleyan chapel with
Westminster Abbey.
Only two or three of the Zanzibar mosques
STREET SCENE IN ZANZIBAR
[To face p. 156
THE GATEWAY OF A FINE OLD ARAB DOORWAY,
FORT SAN SEBASTIAN, MOZAMBIQUE ZANZIBAR

THE EAST COAST 157
have anything approaching minarets, and the
call of the muezzins lacks the intensity and
music of the true Orient. This emerald isle,
which for ever exudes the tender scent of cloves
and the sickening stench of copra, though it has
much of the life and colour and odour of the
East, is, after all, an adjunct of Africa. True,
the Orient has conquered it and encrimsoned
Zanzibar with some of its own gorgeous colouring,
but still this is an annexe of the Dark Continent.
The Cassiterides were not Phoenicia because of
the traders who bartered for tin. It is a curious
ethnological blending of the peoples, this island
city that, seen from a high outlook, is a variegated
ant-heap full of innumerable little alleyways
tunneling below acres of flat roofs and wooden
outlooks. Like all places that bask in sunlit
seas, it is a vision of dazzling whiteness and
purity when seen from the ocean, but a town
that you quickly realize has more than its share
of filth when you tread its twisting, twining
streets. Surely there must be few less perilous
cities in the world in which to sit a runaway
horse than Zanzibar.
Streets bolt like rabbits down into dark holes,
and just when a cul-de-sac seems inevitable a
little slender opening directs the way to another
path in the warren. It is a sort of Hampton
Court maze, but if you will bear with the twin-
ings sufficiently long you will either arrive at the
Hotel Africa or the market-place, wherein one
may drink the fresh milk of the cocoanut and
buy prayer mats and rusty old Arab knives at
twice their worth. And if you continue the
peregrination, you will probably arrive some¬
where outside the Sultan's Palace, which stands
out the most dominant building on the sea-front,
with its tall tower and straggling blocks of
buildings connected by bridges and passages.
This group of abodes for the Sultan, the
Sultana and other domestic appanages of every
Moslem ruler’s court, was built by Seyid Bargash
between thirty and forty years ago; but in
1896 the Sultan was insolent to his Britannic
mistress, and in the bombardment that worked
a swift retribution, the house that Bargash built
was levelled to the ground, and his Islamic
Highness’s Navy, by which I mean one old ship
named the Glasgow, was sent to visit Davy Jones.
A mast stands sorrowfully up from the sapphire
sea. It thrusts itself on your view right in
front of the very Palace gates, and seems to utter
an everlasting warning to those of our scattered
kingdoms who resent the matronly hand of the
Great Protectress.
Ali Bin Hamud, the modern pseudo-ruler, who
is a well-spoken Harrovian with a coffee-black
skin, recently abdicated, for he said his health
demanded such a step. The lights and bustle of
London, the gaiety of Paris and the subtle
splendour of modern Cairo appeal to him far
more than playing at High Steward in a semi¬
pagan Sultanate. And who can wonder at his
Highness’s impatient clamouring for release?
Those who have been lionized in Europe are
not content to become Equatorial dormice.
Yet the Government in its wisdom thinks that
after the pleasure-grounds of Europe a house
in a clove plantation will fascinate for all time.
And so his youthful Highness has gone to regain
his health—by which I presume he means to
resurrect memories—and another reigns in his
stead.
THE EAST COAST 150
Unless the new Sultan blows up the British
Resident or indulges in some similarly improbable
act of lunacy, he cannot but go down to posterity
as a good ruler, for his hands are tied by the
nation that demands peace and goodwill and
a fair price for Consols.
His are the 44 shambas 95 (plantations) of M9Do
and Mwera; his that lovely bit of Zanzibar
which is known as Bububu, to which a toy engine
on toy rails puffs and snorts. His are the narrow
streets and marts, the peoples, the bazaars,
and the other islets that cluster round this
emerald in the sapphire setting. But they are
only his in name. He has much to survey but
he is no monarch. The despotism of his ancestors
began to totter when, one hundred and fifteen
years ago, Commodore Blankett 44 threshed up
the East Coast of Africa against the north-east
monsoon and a strong current.99
The cardinal ensign that flies from the flag¬
staff is his emblem, but, methinks, he can never
gaze on it without seeing Britannic stripes of
blue and white searing the red field. The doors
and balconies of his palace are graven with texts
from the Koran, but there must be one word in
the philosophy of the book that for ever sheds
the consolation of the mystic East—Kismet.
It is the writing on the wall the hand of fate has
carved in the great characters of the Foreign
and Colonial Offices: 44 Thy kingdom shall be taken
from thee." It is a legend that the pen of destiny
is scrawling across the uttermost places of the
earth. These are no mystic symbols, no hiero¬
glyphics; the very children in the market-place
can read them. The mainland has long realized
their portent, and you too Zanzibar, island that
clings to the ribs of Africa, have come to know
ii
160 THE BONDS OP AFRICA
their meaning. Island where the palms bend
to soft-scented breezes, where azure sky blends
with azure sea—
“ Stronghold that the corsairs sacked,
Island that we British lacked,
Sultanate the Powers hacked.
The legend’s meant for you ! ”
CHAPTER X
THE EAST COAST (CONTINUED) :

DAR-ES-SALAAM AND MOMBASA
Away in the west the sun was dipping behind

those curious pryamid-shaped hills that march
with the coast-line up to Cape Delgado.
Bronson, an old American friend of mine, and
I were leaning over the rails of the Adolf
Woermann watching the gathering of the gloom
and the last glory of the day. Said he—
64 If I were an artist I would locate in Mozam¬
bique for a year, and study those coral tints
and the pinks and blues and yellows of those
quaint old houses.”
An Oberleutnant from Swakopmund joined in
the conversation.
44 Ach,” he ventured, 44 you will like Dar-es-
Salaam zo much better. It is zhust like a big
city in Germany.”
Bronson looked at him, and I saw a merry
twinkle come into his eyes.
44 See here now,” he remarked, 44 I didn’t
come to East Africa to view Berlin.”
That was more than five years ago, and I had
not then set eyes on the colony of the Kaiser.
But when three days later we entered a wonderful
harbour and saw before us the city of Dar-es-
Salaam, with its great white, modern buildings
and broad 44 Strassen,” Bronson’s rejoinder
assumed a new and admirable significance.
161
Dar-es-Salaam is the capital of German East
Africa, and I object to it because it has too much
of Germany and too little of East Africa. It
is the most strongly built and strongly fortified
place on the coast. Modern fortresses are all
very well in their proper places, but after
slumbering Mozambique, or Oriental Zanzibar,
the vision of a miniature Metz offends the
eyesight.
What a contrast to those two quaint, old-world
towns of which I have already written ! What
a contrast to British Mombasa, where the ghosts
of the old adventurers still hover around Vasco
da Gama’s well, and the grand fort that Seixas
de Cabreira rebuilt. One cannot help regarding
Dar-es-Salaam as an upstart on this littoral of
glorious antiquity. It is as though a Cincinnati
lard-emperor had raised up an ugly sky-scraper
in the grounds of Woburn Abbey. For it is a
seaport without history and a monument to
the Fatherland builded on modern foundations.
True, it has an aspect of great beauty; true, it
is a marvellous testimonial to Teutonic enter¬
prise. But one does not look for twentieth-
century Prussia on a seaboard where every
town exudes romance, and each river-mouth
washes the silt of African mystery, African
fascination and African barbarity out into the
ocean. There is no bar of mediaeval mud to be
crossed on the entrance to Dar-es-Salaam. It is
all new, offensively new.
When well out at sea a stalwart square sort of
lighthouse on a green coast catches the eye.
One would never suspect that such a mighty place
as Dar-es-Salaam could lie behind. There is
nothing in view but verdure and waving palms,
and this white house of warning to mariners.
THE EAST COAST 163
The Deutsche-Ost-Afrika liner turns her bow
to the lighthouse and runs straight for the
shore.
It really seems a case of steamship suicide.
But no ! just when a calamity appears inevitable
a creek begins to take shape out of mainland
jungle, and the Adolf Woermann drives straight
into the narrow opening. The creek twists and
serpentines. This entrance to Dar-es-Salaam is
like a street in the warren of Zanzibar. Time
after time a cul-de-sac in verdure and mud-bank
looms up before the good ship’s bow; time after
time a twist or a turn discloses a new and narrow
way into the harbour.
Presently a corner in the jumble of land- and
sea-scapes is turned, and a great bush-wreathed
bay with a white city built on one arc of the
wreath appears. In some ways the scene recalls
memories of the approach to Milosis, in Rider
Haggard’s romance, Allan Quatermain. But
whereas Milosis was a frowning city, Dar-es-
Salaam has all the appearance of an abode of
peace.
The water that laps so gently against the
shallow beach, the sandbanks that rise so evenly
to the long esplanade running along the sea-front,
the snow-white steeple of the church, the palms
rustling with the murmur of the breeze, and,
above all, the azure sky brilliant with the warmth
and splendour of the sun—surely this is a fairy
bay of rest.
Look into the scene a little more closely,
however, and observe the Seeadler, a German
gunboat, flying the pendant of the “ Mailed
Fist.” Notice a miniature dockyard, troops
around the landing-stage, and a few cannon on
the sea-front. You cannot rob the city of its
robes of Peace, but in truth the garments cover
the muscled body of War.
The first time I saw Dar-es-Salaam I did not
realize that it could take on some of the martial
aspects of Aden or Gibraltar. It seemed a
South Sea islet on which had been builded a
sort of Teutonic Shepherd’s Bush Fair. It was
all very thorough and all very orderly. The
Governor’s Residence was palatial, the Hotel
Kaiserhof sumptuous, the church magnificent,
and the railway station, the seaboard terminus
of the M’Rogoro line, admirable.
Long-robed Swahilis mingled with the khaki-
clad soldiery. Huge Germans in white drill
suits and beehive helmets drank beer and
mopped their brows, for it was very, very hot.
In the broad, unshaded “ Strassen ”—if the
authorities only would make them narrower and
raise up avenues of palms—the stinging sunshine
glanced off the white road with a merciless,
blinding glare.
A ricksha took me out to where, on the edge
of a spit of land, an aquarium had been built,
in which a few crayfish peered stupidly through
discoloured water and thick plate-glass. Out¬
side this little maritime Zoo the foliage was
luxuriant and rich. Officials’ residences were
scattered plentifully throughout the fairy garden
—nearly the whole of Dar-es-Salaam is official.
I wended my way back to the Post Office, cool
and spacious, and then to the landing-stage.
The sun had given me a splitting headache and
my eyes burned with the wicked glare of the
streets.
After a few months in Uganda and British
East Africa I returned to Dar-es-Salaam on
board the Burgermeister, laden with marines and
THE EAST COAST 165
rails for the line that is to strike right into the
heart of the Tanganyika country and exploit
trade for the German Empire. We stayed here
for several days, discharging these metal roads
for the iron horse to run along, and then it was
that I saw Dar-es-Salaam, capital of our Germanic
rival’s Colony, the borders of which march with
our own dependencies of East Africa and
Northern Rhodesia, in a new light.
An Italian gunboat, which had been coasting
off the Juba, put into the Bay of Rest and
saluted the German flag. From peaceful-looking
palm groves modern cannon returned the inter¬
national compliment. A Gunner Major from
India and I went ashore and saw battalions of
black troops, officered by Germans and drilled
by German sergeants. They marched and
“goose-stepped,” and the ground shook with the
stamp of many feet. The Gunner raised his
eyebrows in a mild surprise and asked me if
I was not amazed that this lazy lagoon could
become so warlike. I had not associated the
spirit of Sedan with the harbour of peace. And
yet in reality there should have been nothing
surprising about it. We all know now that one
of the dreams of Berlin is a great German Empire
in Africa, washed by the Atlantic on the one
side and the Indian Ocean on the other. Dar-es-
Salaam has been builded as a corner-stone in the
Imperial conception.
We in East Africa have been content to re¬
garrison crazy old fortresses, to let colonization
mingle with antiquity. We have peopled the
highlands, and count our power in terms of
occupied farms and coffee crops.
Not so Germany. She has reared up strong
places on the coast and girt her Colonial policy
in chain armour. She is for ever having little
campaigns with some of the seven million blacks
who inhabit her East African territory, and when
she has subdued them she makes soldiers of the
most able, and gives them bayonets for the
poisoned arrows they have surrendered. She has
erected great military-operated hospitals on the
coast, inaugurated flotillas, and her white popula¬
tion in the tropical dependency consists of mili¬
tary secretaries, police officers, captains of flotilla,
sergeants and other Government agents.
Railways are advancing into the interior, and
much of the trade that has in the past gone from
Muanza and Bukoba and Shirati and the other
Victoria Nyanzan ports over British lines is in
future to go a more patriotic route. She has
placed ships on Tanganyika and Nyasa, and an
aluminium pinnace on Victoria Nyanza, and
when the officers who command them look over
to the shores of the Congo and Portuguese East
Africa, I have no doubt they drink a silent toast
to the 64 great day.” One may observe the same
spirit of preparation, the same undertone of
force and armed strength in Tanga, some one
hundred and fifty miles to the north of Dar-es-
Salaam.
Tanga Bay, like that of Dar-es-Salaam, is very
beautiful, but it is not nearly such a difficult
entrance. It is the coast terminus of the
Usambara Railway, another line of commerce,
dedicated to the trade gods of the Fatherland.
Here, too, as at the capital, are solid edifices,
officers’ residences, barracks, etc., all machinery
of Government. There are also hotels, stores,
etc., of commendable appearance and stability.
There is a black band, the members of which
dispense music, and at eve, when the bay is
THE EAST COAST 167
aglow with the lights of shipping and the purple
dusk mingles with the dying sunlight, to look over
the sea-front and see Tanga harbour is as fair
a sight as one can wish for. Some way inland
are high hills, and from these may be seen the
great peak of Kilimanjaro, for ever robed in
snow. On the mainland, in the vicinity of
Tanga, a good deal of sisal is grown, and
altogether Tanga may be reckoned a port of
considerable importance.
That it is to become a place of far greater
worth in the years about to come is the nightly
prayer of every good German resident. It can
scarcely hope to out-rival Dar-es-Salaam, for that
is the headquarters of everything Imperial and
ambitious in this vast territory, 384,000 square
miles in extent, which Germany got through
Carl Peters, certain merchants who became
active on the East Coast in the ’eighties, and
the Heligoland Convention. Germany paid the
Sultan of Zanzibar the paltry sum of £200,000
for these mainland territories, and she has
sunk millions in pursuance of a Colonial policy
which she fully intends shall expand and
progress.
If Germany ever gratifies her African ambitions,
Dar-es-Salaam will be a possession of well-
nigh dominating power, for it has been founded
by an iron will and erected on basement stones
of solidity, with military mortar to bind the
blocks of government together. And if this
East Coast possession ever does become but one
littoral of a sea-to-sea Empire, there will shine
a great glory on that well-built, offensively
modern place called Dar-es-Salaam, which means
in Arabic, the Door of Peace, and in German, the
Gateway of a Warring|Empire.
The East Coast has changed greatly since its
corsair days. Places that were once accounted
strongholds have become phlegmatic ports of
industry; and words which were unknown in
those sanguinary times now take the places
of Mombasa and Mozambique, and stand for
all that means strength and fortification and
defiance. The native name for Mombasa bears
the interpretation of “ Island of War,” and it is
probable that no other place on earth has seen
so much fighting and sack and rapine as this. Its
history is even more drenched in blood than
Mozambique or Zanzibar.
To-day it scarcely gives one the impression
of being an East Coast Gibraltar. Seen from
the ocean it is a town of bewitching loveliness.
The blue sea rolls and tumbles in towards a
shore all draped in tender green, and amid the
foliage white bungalows peep through a floral
galaxy of bougainvillea towards white-crested
breakers. On the sea-front the grand old fort,
now used as a prison, proclaims that this was
once a port that swayed the balance of East
Coast power.
Mombasa is an island separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel, and linked up
with the Protectorate proper by the Makupa
bridge of the Uganda Railway.
Mombasa is not a port that big ships dare
enter. The large liners cast anchor in the
beautiful bay of Kilindini, some two or three
miles from the old town. Kilindini is the
starting-point of the Uganda Railway, the most
wonderful line in the world. It has very rightly
been termed a railway through the Pleistocene,
for it meanders across great open plains, where
wild animals are to be observed from the carriage
THE OLD FORT, MOMBASA
[ To face p. 168
INDIAN SNAKE CHARMER, MOMBASA
THE EAST COAST 169
windows—wild animals not in scores, but by the

countless hundred.
One day Kilindini is to possess a deep-water
pier, but for the present all goods have to be
discharged and cargo taken on by means of
lighters, and a very slow and laborious sort of
business it is. One day, too, perhaps, Kilindini
will have a Customs House more worthy of the
Protectorate. As it is to-day there is chaos
indescribable at the landing-stage and in the
Customs sheds.
An American lady globe-trotter has lost her
precious Kodak and tears frantically around
questioning officials and scrutinizing the loads
of smiling and confused Swahili porters. A big-
game hunter is having a freshly-loaded lighter
emptied because he thinks a box of cartridges
is under a load of potatoes. A missionary’s
groceries have gone astray, and are rescued just
in time to prevent them returning by the home¬
going boat to Europe. One heaves a great sigh
of relief when at last the luggage is safely out of
this zone of dangerous confusion.
The town of Mombasa, as the scarlet flag of
his Highness proclaims, is in the Sultan of
Zanzibar’s dominions, and is rented from him
by the British Government. Like Caesar’s Gaul,
it may be divided into three parts—the old Arab
and native quarter, the central portion, which is
the town proper, and the stretch of high ground
facing the Indian Ocean and the surge of the
rolling sea where the European residents have
raised pretty bungalows. Native Mombasa ex¬
tends towards the 46 shambas ” or plantations,
and is largely hidden by them. In the central
portion are the Government offices, and the
shops and residences of the Goanese and Indian
traders, with a fair sprinkling of Japanese,
Zanzibaris and multi-coloured peoples of the
East.
From Kilindini runs a tram-line character¬
istic of Mombasa, where it is always too warm
or else too wet to walk. Along this line trollies,
or “ gharries,” are propelled by Swahili boys
clad in flowing white garments. The track
undulates along past Kilindini railway station;
and between the jolts and jostlings one has time
to observe immense mango trees throwing a
wealth of welcome shade. A police station
manned by well-knit askaris rushes by. The
gharry boys pant and puff and gasp about
“ backsheesh ” between their breaths. But the
ride is nearly at an end, for the cathedral, an
imposing edifice, cruciform in shape and with
ogee-formed dome, comes into sight, and there
again beyond this house of worship, built in
memory of Bishops Hannington and Parker, is
the peaceful blue of the Indian Ocean and the
familiar white glint of dhow sails.
Here is the heart of spectacular Mombasa.
On the left are hotels and well-equipped stores.
Beyond the cathedral are the public gardens all
aglow with colour riot. They form a fitting crown
for the statue of Sir William Mackinnon—the
Rhodes of East Africa. On Saturdays a Swahili
band discourses music here. Skirting the gardens
are the Treasury and District Commissioner’s
offices, guarded by sentries who eye their
bayonets with conscious pride.
Farther on are the Court House buildings and
the grand old fort—relic of the romantic past.
It is now used as a common gaol, this massive
old citadel which once bid defiance to all the
ships of murder that seemed to regard Mombasa
THE EAST COAST 171
as a marine tavern where every crazy craft must
drop in and join in a brawl of bloodshed. With
its fine old inscribed gateway and great brass-
studded doors, it is a treasure of antiquity that
should be guarded as zealously as the Crown
jewels. Beyond it, and still hugging the sea¬
shore, is the Mombasa Club, a place as modern
as the fort is old. There you may play snooker
on fast-cushioned, up-to-date tables, or learn
new ideas on auction-bridge, and while away
the scorching hours with “ Johnnie Collinses,”
“ Horses’ Necks,” or some other strangely
seductive and strangely intoxicating East Coast
drink.
Were the early European conquerors of Mom¬
basa to drop in here their ears would sing with
strange talk. They would listen in vain for
the stern tidings of buccaneers. They would
hear that young Sabreton of the K.A.R.’s was
coming down to catch the Goorkha, minus an
arm chewed up by a lion, that Lord Farmerville
was selling all his cattle at the next Nankuru
fair, that the Duke of Vienna had been charged
by a rhino, and that Jones had ridden three
winners at the Nairobi races. They would shout
with joy at the sight of the old well in Vasco
da Gama street, an antique brother of the
desecrated fort. But the Hotel Africa, with its
wonderful collection of liquors and cigarette
advertisements, would be strangely unfamiliar.
Farther along this street are the Mombasa
Customs House, where huge stocks of massive
ivory are often to be seen, and the Port landing-
stage.
If you are sufficiently adventurous you may
leave His Majesty’s Excise, and skirting round
the waters of the harbour come into Swahilidom,
composed of huts and hovels all jumbled
together, with narrow paths and ditches sepa¬
rating the various dwellings. The smell here
is not particularly pleasant, and unless you are
very curious, or are going to write a book, it is
likely that you will soon be gharry-bound for
the Club and anticipating the joy of a long and
cooling glass.
Few visitors to our East African Empire
sojourn long in Mombasa; there is so much to
do and so much to see in the fascinating lands
that lie 44 up country.” But if you ever have to
wait for a ship in the seaport of the East African
Protectorate, there is a great deal to interest
and much to ponder on in this town, which has
come down in the world. It is not even to-day
the capital of a peace-seeking Crown Colony, for
Nairobi wrested from it that distinction a few
years ago. It is merely a companion of Mozam¬
bique in the misfortune of having seen the pomp
and circumstance of plunder and conquest in the
days that are beyond recall.
There is to my mind something infinitely
sad about the East Coast of Africa. Mombasa
and Mozambique are surely entitled to weep
for the past, as much so as Athens or Jerusalem.
One can forgive them if they look with scorn
on the modern bricks of Dar-es-Salaam and the
tin palaces of Nairobi. Their’s is a memory
saddened by a mildewed magnificence, and every
new railway shed that is built in Nairobi, and
every new residence that is raised to grace
Dar-es-Salaam, must make their grief more
poignant. But cities, like humans, must accept
the decree of Fate. At even when the sun is
low and the waving palms bow their heads to
the windless dusk, it has seemed to me that the
THE EAST COAST 178
Tyre and Sidon of East Africa have signified
their submission through the medium of their
native trees—they have bowed to the inexorable
laws of civilization and gathered their ghosts
within their remnant walls*
CHAPTER XI
BRITISH EAST AFRICA : TO THE NYIKA-

BOUND NORTH
The Uganda Railway has cost, in round

figures, six millions sterling, and never, probably,
was the expenditure of such a huge sum of
money initiated with a more vague and inde¬
finite object. One outstanding reason for the
linking up of Mombasa and Lake Victoria
Nyanza—and be it ever to the credit of Great
Britain that it was a major reason—was
the crushing of the slave trade. The necessity
for maintaining an efficient means of com¬
munication with rebellious Uganda was also
evident, but neither of these objectives was at
all clearly outlined or appreciated. The country
for some years after the Government acquired
it from the company of which Sir William
Mackinnon was the presiding genius was little
understood. It was known to be peopled by the
warlike Masai, and it was said in England by a
British statesman that for every mile of rail
laid a Briton would seek his grave with a Masai
spear deep in his heart.
It is true that the tribes of East Africa have
given us some trouble in the construction of the
line. The Nandi campaign was the outcome of
systematic theft of metal from the lines and
telegraph wires in order to make bracelets and
forge spears. But the casualty list of those
174
BRITISH EAST AFRICA 175
killed and mauled by wild beasts has been
greater than of those speared and wounded by
wild men. If you would read of the audacity,
terror-striking and demoralizing, with which
the king of beasts has interrupted work on the
Uganda Railway, Lieut.-Col. Patterson’s ex¬
citing book, The Man-eaters of Tsavo, may be
commended to your notice. A lion has been
actually known to pull a man from a railway
carriage at night. Another dragged a husband
from his wife’s side in a tent, and after devouring
the man, returned and licked up the bath water
put by for the morning tub, whilst the terrified
woman lay only a few feet away.
Rhino have been known to charge engines,
and elephants to pull down telegraph wires. But,
despite all these difficulties, inevitable in railway
construction in Equatorial Africa, the Uganda
railway is to-day more than paying its way. Its
humanitarian object has long been achieved.
Slavery is no more. From the windows of the
comfortable coaches one may witness some of
the most remarkable scenes of the world. The
vistas of forest-clad escarpments, the plains and
lakes, and the great valleys alone pay interest
on the six millions expended on the railway.
There is another wonderful thing to gaze
on—the great snow-capped mountains of Equa¬
torial Africa. Leaving Mombasa at noon by
the Lake Victoria Nyanza express, the traveller,
if he is fortunate, may obtain a magnificent
view of Kilimanjaro, 19,200 feet high, early
next morning. Sometimes the view is wholly
obscured, and even when the atmosphere is
pure with the fresh purity of the young day,
it is a little difficult to make out the towering
top of the second highest peak in Africa. But
12
once its form has been found, and the eye has
learned where Kilimanjaro ends and the higher
clouds begin, the proud crest, so lofty and
majestic, seems to grow and increase in grandeur
and sublime beauty, and vision leaves it with a
caressing and regretful farewell.
East and Central Africa are two of the very
few remaining portions of the world wherein
man may pursue and slay wild animals under
somewhat similar conditions to those obtaining
in Western Europe many hundreds of years ago,
when our forefathers lived by hunting, robed
themselves in skins, and recognized in 64 spoor ”
the hors d? oeuvre of their next meal. Although
the East African Protectorate is now traversed
by a railway line, and can pride itself on pos¬
sessing important towns, well laid-out farms and
a large settler population, it can still boast of an
extraordinary plenitude of great game—indeed,
the big game of the East African Protectorate
seems to be on the increase rather than on the
decline. Passengers in the comfortable coaches
of the Uganda Railway may still gaze out in
wonder on enormous herds of zebra, gazelle,
wildebeeste, and hartebeeste. They may see
wild ostriches within a stone’s-throw of the
screeching locomotive, and the ungainly giraffe
may be observed from nearly every train that
travels from the coast to Nairobi. Sometimes,
too, a lion may be seen bounding away from the
paths of man, his mortal enemy, and within
recent years more than one stupid, blundering
old rhinoceros has defiantly charged the cow¬
catcher !
Such scenes naturally create in the sportsman
a longing to be away in the wilds and outside of
the boundaries of the game reserves which the
FALLS ON THE CHANIA RIVER BETWEEN NAIROBI A GROUP OF KIKUYU ON THE EMBU
Government authorities have so wisely created

for the preservation of the intensely interesting
fauna of this part of the Dark Continent. We
were accordingly greatly pleased when one fine
morning in August having got our 44 safari ”
(hunting expedition) together., we rode out of
Nairobi with our faces set towards Donyo Sabuk
—the great mountain mass which towers skywards
to the north of Nairobi. We had with us
seventy 46 pagazis,” or porters, to carry our
loads; nine Somali servants, syces, 44 askaris ”
(or native police), and a certain number of
44 totos ” or 44 picannins,” employed by the
porters to carry their tents and blankets. All
told we numbered over ninety, and great was
the noise and shouting as we marched off on
the Fort Hall road.
Our first shoot was at N’Durugu, nearly
halfway between Nairobi and Fort Hall, the
capital of the Kenya Province. Here we shot
44 kongoni ” or Coke’s hartebeeste, and impala.
The former animals were exceedingly numerous

there, as indeed they are over a great part of
the East African Protectorate. They are un¬
gainly-looking beasts, but, despite their awk¬
ward, lumbering gallop, they are capable of
putting a very good distance between pursuer
and pursued in an amazingly short space of time.
We found 44 kongoni,” in fact, so plentiful as to
constitute a veritable nuisance. Time after
time in East Africa, when we were stalking some
more highly-prized trophy than an ugly harte¬
beeste head, a great herd of these animals would
break cover and carry away all other game
with them.
From N’Durugu we travelled along the Thika
River to Fort Hall, and thence to Embu, a
prettily-situated hill station built at the eastern
foot of Mount Kenia. Buffalo roam around
Embu in astonishing numbers, and I secured a
good bull with over 40-inch horns there.
About ninety miles to the north of Nairobi,
Kenia—one of the three highest mountains of
Africa—raises her snow-clad crest three miles
above the level of the sea, peering through the
cloud-mists across a fair-robed plain to where
her sister peak of Kilimanjaro watches over the
best of Germany’s possessions in Africa.
In the heart of the fertile Kikuyu country,
around Mount Kenia, cluster a host of tribes—
peoples pastoral and agricultural, like the Masai
and the Kikuyu; peoples wild and unbroken
like the treacherous Suka; peoples warlike;
peoples nomadic. Yet, though these have
come through the ages to know the mountain as
the warden of their uncultured lives, they taunt
her with harbouring ghouls and fiends, forest
lions, and deadly snow-sprites. She is to them
at once a mysterious host of evil, and a maternal
god pouring from her sides tumbling streams,
and throwing to her children deep handfuls of
rich black earth.
Kenia from its height of over 17,000 feet looks
down upon as many Government stations as she
does upon tribes of the governed. Nestling
around her colossal base, hidden by her foothills,
are Fort Hall, Embu, Meru, and Nyeri. Fort
Hall, named after an early official of our East
African Empire who laid down his life in the
cause of his Queen, lies on the southern side,
and is the capital of the Kenia Province. The
rushing Sagana scurries below it, and away to
the east, amid hillocks and verdure, the Tana
wanders seawards. The road to Embu, which
lies about thirty miles to the north, crosses
the Tana, of which the Wa-Meru speak in
their folklore and sing in their chants. The
Tana was to the Wa-Meru what the Red Sea
proved to the Israelites of old. When they
migrated towards the setting sun in the dim
days of long ago, their legends have it, its broad
waters rolled asunder and let them pass over in
safety. Embu flies the lion-emblazoned flag
of East Africa from a lofty hill-top. Mem is
five days5 march to the north, and a more
strenuous march it would be difficult to con¬
ceive. Through dense plantain groves where
the unruly Suka Kikuyu peer at you, seeing but
unseen, and up hill and down dale, the moun¬
tain path twists and turns—a climb as arduous as
the ascent of the Matterhorn—and the traveller
heaves a sigh of relief when the cunningly con¬
structed winter pagoda of the Commissioner
has been gained. On the south-western slope
lies Nyeri, flanked by lofty cedar trees. Kenia
to the north and Kinangop to the south, weep
over the beauty of this hill-station, and the
tears of cloudland have robed Nyeri in a hue
of green, as rich and beautiful as the verdure
of an English pastureland. Farther afield are
Nairobi and Rumuruti, other posts in the ad¬
ministrative network. When, a few months
ago, I left the capital of the East African Pro¬
tectorate and rode northwards, thoughts of
Kenia filled my mind equally with thoughts of
big game. For days I watched for her to throw
off her mantle of cloud and show her snow¬
capped glory. Through the Fort Hall hills,
across the Sagana River, I came nearer and
nearer to her, and still her virgin beauty was
hidden as a frightened Eastern maid hides her
charms from the prying multitude. I had seen
her three years before, from the top of the
Kikuyu Escarpment, when, one gloriously clear
day, her smile had burst forth to the north, and
the towering top of giant Kilimanjaro had pierced
the heavens to the south-east, but I longed to
see the northern peak close at hand. Day
after day she disappointed me, till one morning
at Embu, when the sky was clear and blue, she
flung her majesty into the dome of azure, serene
and chaste and exquisitely fair in her garment
of snow, but with a suggestion of cruelty and
defiance in the ragged edges of her summits.
But if Kenia is beautiful, the people who live
by her grace in this part of Africa are wild, ill-
featured savages. As yet they are scarcely
subjected to British rule. Indeed only a few
months ago they fired poisoned arrows at a
District Commissioner who had gone his ad¬
ministrative way among them. The accom¬
panying photograph of Mutua, chief of one of
the most unruly factions, I took at a village
where trouble at one time seemed imminent
over a paltry question of firewood. But after
a display of firmness the old villain exercised
all his powers to secure peace, and eventually
he got a few cents for his trouble instead of
the bullet which perhaps otherwise would have
been his reward.
By the Suka Kikuyu, Kenia is called Kilimara,
a word which, very liberally translated, means
46 deceptive mountain.” The old chief, Mutua, of
the khaki helmet and cheap rug, explained that
the great hill was so named because it seemed
to lie close at hand, yet when you set out to
reach its rugged masses it appeared to retreat
farther and farther into its cloudland fastnesses.
THE AUTHOR AND A BUFFALO NEAR EMEU
[To face p. 180
MUTUWA AND HIS TRUCULENT HEADMEN

And so it is. Kenia has an enormous base.
Its foothills extend for many miles around its
snow-sheathed pinnacle—sentinels, as it were,
posted to protect the serene majesty of this
Queen of peaks. Over these rugged slopes the
path to Meru twists and turns, across tumbling
streams, over little wooden bridges, across
mountain tops, through bush-clad valleys.
Sometimes your pony’s ears prick themselves
to the rising sun, sometimes to the Nyika-bound
North, sometimes to cloud-wrapped Kenia.
When the air is clear and cool and crisp, the icy
summit stands out so boldly against the blue
of the equatorial sky, and the rugged rocks are
so well defined that it seems but a few hours’
march to the snowline. But when the swirling,
sombre morning mists wrap her in a shroud she
looks far, far distant. Even the foothills make
the heart feel faint, and the pony’s strides
seem slow and halting as the measured notes
of a funeral march.
Some days, when hunting on the Guaso Nyiro,
I would look southwards, and there far up in
the higher heavens the snowy summit pierced
the dome of the sullen sky. At times a ray of
golden light would fall on the proud pinnacle and
cover its snow raiment with a scintillating glory,
and the heavens would burn with the reflected
beauty of this exquisite “ Lady of the Snows.”
I grew to look for Kenia, and when her snow
face was hidden I felt as though some momentous
friend had vanished. On the Nyeri road I
took my last look at her. The snow crags
appeared more steep and forbidding than they
had seemed from the Embu-Meru side. But if
the beauty of the mountain was tempered by an
aspect of rugged defiance, the queen-like grace
of Kenia was not one whit the less bewitching.
In the clear, cold morning air her topmost crags
looked like icebergs in a celestial sea, and I said
good-bye to her with humble regret.
Mem is but an infant among the administrat¬
ive posts of our East African Empire-one of
the youngest of the establishments of law and
order and justice. Nevertheless it has quickly
borne the blossom of the great tree of protective
government, the tree which has spread its
giant roots westwards to the floral feet of colossal
Ruwenzori, northwards to the Abyssinian fron¬
tier, southwards to the forests of the Sotik.
Proudly the lion-emblazoned flag bends to the
cold winds that blow over this highland Boma,
5,800 feet above the sea. Five years ago the
seed of government was planted here. The
bush was cleared, clusters of huts quickly be¬
came finished “askari” lines, Government offices
proclaimed the peaceful conquest of the mud-
stained Meru. To-day one sees a lovely sward
almost as emerald green as an English tennis-
lawn, a log-built pagoda, the residence of the
District Commissioner, all surrounded by flower¬
beds, all abloom with the pinks and whites of
carnations. Jombani Mountain frowns down
on it all, as though this stern old guardian of
Meruland resented the carnations in the rightful
home of the plantain groves, and the British
flag where might was right and a long, cruel
spear blade the emblem of rule. Jombani and
M’Wimbi are two mountain masses which over¬
look the Meru country, and have watched ages
of barbarism roll by in the process of the suns,
and now look suspiciously at the beginnings of
a new epoch and a new drama in the strange
old playhouse of life wherein the dramatis
personae are Government officials, big-game
enthusiasts, long-bearded Italian missionaries, men
from a land where rouge and face powder are
used instead of clay and mud and evil-smelling
grease. Meru is in the centre of a hill country.
In the forests herds of elephants roam and
strip and feed. But there are few great bulls
left in the troops. Time was when the early
officials could shoot their tuskers before break¬
fast. Here the Roosevelt expedition halted for
a while and five or six elephants fell to their
rifles.
The Wa-Meru are an offshoot of the great Ki¬
kuyu tribe. They can boast of a large proportion
of finely-built men, some of whom are really
handsome, despite their endeavours to render
themselves hideous by means of clay and grease
rubbed into their faces and often worked into a
grotesque patchwork. Many of their women¬
folk, too, are of fine physique and appearance,
although the male members of the community
seem to have monopolized the greater share
when good looks and healthy physique were
originally served out.
Their “ El-moran,” or young warriors, are,
as a whole, a fine body of men, agile and well
knitted together. They are athletes of no mean
ability, and are particularly proficient in the
art of wrestling. They mat and plait the hair,
and rub grease and mud into the knotted plaits.
Armed with long, keen-bladed spears and mur¬
derous-looking swords, they have proved them¬
selves foes of no mean mettle on more than one
occasion. When Meru was first established as
an administrative Boma, the countryside ran
blood because of “ nguos,” or vendettas, sworn
by the El-moran. A whole “ rika,” or clan,
would take their most solemn and sacred oaths
to eat no food, cohabit with none of their
womenkind, sleep beneath the sheltering thatch
of no hut until each had killed his man. Their
daub and clay they washed off, and besmeared
themselves with ashes. Cow’s hoofs they hung
round their ears. They made the forest their
lairs, and the bush was alive with soft, mys¬
terious whisperings. They would pick their man,
and a deep, cruel spear-wound or a jagged cut
from a barbed arrow would break their self-
imposed fast. Such was the Meru “ nguo.”
From Meru we marched northwards along
the Guaso Marra, and on September 6th we
pitched camp on the banks of the Guaso Nyiro
river.
CHAPTER XII
BRITISH EAST AFRICA (CONTINUED) :
TOWARDS THE LORIAN
The northern Guaso Nyiro river certainly

may be accounted one of the finest tracts of
big-game country in Africa. To me it ranks
equally with the valley of the great Luangwa,
that burning rift in the surface of North-Eastern
Rhodesia which cuts through Africa from Lake
Tanganyika to the Zambesi. These are, indeed,
great natural “ zoos ”—menageries where moun¬
tains and forests replace unsightly cages. The
rugged mass of Laishamunye that frowns down on
the Guaso Nyiro from the north indeed might well
have been Ararat, on which Noah’s zoological
houseboat came to rest, and where the animals
trooped out exultant—and presumably hungry.
Grand old Guaso Nyiro of the far-distant
North ! As I write I can see it meandering among
green oases, sweeping round sun-scorched tongues
of arid desert, coursing beneath great, rocky
buttresses, or flowing peacefully to the east to
lose itself in the Lorian swamp. Memory brings
to my ears the music of the wind among the palms
on its banks. Visions of oryx and zebra in
herds to be numbered by the hundred, of the
wily gerenuk wending his cautious way through
the bush-belts, of the giant giraffe and the ugly
rhino—these flit before me. Here, indeed, are
the wilds—the land of life unfettered—and the
185
man who has sojournel awhile in their midst
must have a soul that is dead if he cannot feel
their grip strong upon him long after he has
returned to the hollow contentment of an easy-
chair and the morning newspaper.
The life of the late Arthur Neumann typifies
the spirit of which I write better, perhaps, than
any panegyric that might be written round the
solitudes of the vast interior. Neumann was at
one time a Cape civil servant; but he longed
for a life that the Colony could no longer give
him, and so he migrated to Mombasa in the days
of our East African Empire’s birth. Throughout
the length and breadth of the Protectorate the
name of Neumann is known. Fie was a magnifi¬
cent shot, and he earned for himself the sobriquets
of 44 Nyama Yangu ” and 64 Resasa Moja.” The
former means 44 My meat.” It is said by the
natives that this was Neumann’s pet expression
when some grand specimen of African fauna was
pointed out to him. 44 Resasa Moja ” may be
interpreted as 44 One cartridge.” Those who have
hunted big game will appreciate these testimonies
to his marksmanship. Neumann was a hunter
who seldom missed, and the name of a man who
invariably brings down his animal with one
shot is written as large in native history as
Napoleon’s is in the records of more civilized
peoples. The Wa-Meru and the Samburu chant
of Neumann’s prowess in their songs. In the
days when the Guaso Nyiro was a no-man’s land
he made all the vast tract from Kenia to Lake
Rudolph and Marsabit his own hunting-grounds.
It is a tragedy of relentless fate that this colossus
amongst African Nimrods died by his own hand
in the great fog-ridden city of London.
Neumann’s old camps are to be found scattered
BUFFALO BULL; NORTHERN GUASO NYIRO RIVER
[ To face p. 186
MY BEST GERENUK
all over East Africa; but the most noted is that
known as Kampi ya Nyama Yangu, situated on
the banks of the northern Guaso Nyiro, and close
to its junction with the Guaso Marra. I have
many vivid and exciting recollections of the camp,
with its sandy soil and great, kindly trees. Meru
and its hospitable District Commissioner, Mr.
E. B. Horne, we had left six days before the
“ safari ” camped at Neumann’s old Boma, and
no one was sorry to reach it after the hard tramp
over the jagged, lava-strewn desert that extends
almost from the Jombani range to the Guaso.
On the march my keen-eyed Somali gun-bearer
sighted two rhino one morning. Not since I
had been hunting in the Chinicoatali valley of
North-Eastern Rhodesia had I seen these curious
animals, so I was rather elated at the prospect
of again having a little excitement with them.
They are extremely bad-tempered, aggressive
beasts, but very short-sighted, and as the wind
was right, Elmi and I walked up to within sixty
or seventy yards of this pair without any attempt
at concealment. We saw that their horns were
short, and I decided not to shoot them. I
elected, however, to have an essay at animal
photography, an attempt which nearly had an
unpleasant ending. The beasts were asleep,
so I crouched up to them, kodak in hand, until
within about forty yards of their slumbering
uglinesses. Elmi stood behind me with my *375
rifle, ready for emergencies. I took one photo
of the pair, and then Elmi gave a shrill whistle.
Instantly two hideous heads went up and two
pairs of sharp horns raised themselves in the air.
The rhino began to amble suspiciously from side
to side, and I managed to get another snapshot.
I then told Elmi to whistle again. He did; and
the two rhino turned like a pair of polo ponies
and launched themselves upon us. I knew Elmi
could be trusted, so I pointed the lens at the
leader and squeezed the bulb. Photographing
two rhino run mad is not pleasant work if you
are standing in their track; however, as soon
as I had clicked the shutter I jumped behind
Elmi, who had dropped on one knee and was just
about to pull the trigger. There was not time
for me to seize the rifle. No sooner had I realized
this, as in the flash of a second, than the *375
cracked out sharp and clear. I saw the leading
animal, now only a few yards from us, his little,
evil pig eyes the very incarnation of a devilish
fury, halt for a fraction of a moment as Elmi’s
bullet hit him full on the base of the horn. For
but a quarter of a second he seemed stunned;
the next instant, snorting loudly, he wheeled to
the left, a model of pachydermal indignation.
I had wondered what course of action the second
rhino would pursue, so I hastily grabbed the gun
from Elmi and rammed another cartridge in
the breech; but the wheeler of this wrathful
tandem had gone the way of his or her mate.
Over the sandy-soiled Nyika (desert) the pair
were rushing, temper and terror curiously inter¬
mingled. I heaved a little sigh of relief, but
Elmi merely shook his head, scowled at them, and,
breaking for a moment into Swahili, described
them as “M’Baya sana! ” (very bad!). He
told me that on one occasion a rhino had ripped
his khaki shirt open, so Elmi was entitled to bear
the species a certain amount of animosity.
Unfortunately the snapshots were disappointing.
The camera was only quarter-plate size, and I fear
my focus was all wrong.
Game was very abundant along the path from
Mem to Neumann’s old camp, and I got a 27-inch
impala, an oryx, and a couple of Grant’s gazelle
on the journey to the river. All around
Kampi ya Nyama Yangu giraffe, rhinoceroses,
oryx, water-buck, gerenuk, and impala literally
swarmed. I had particularly fine sport one day,
for in the morning I bagged an oryx, and a few
minutes afterwards espied a solitary old rhino
wending his way through the thorn bushes. He
seemed quite unaware of my presence, so I
walked quickly and noiselessly towards him,
but well away to his right in order to get broad¬
side on and take the neck shot. Rhino have
huge spinal columns, and a well-placed bullet
that smashes this ends their careers without further
trouble. When I had reached the point I desired
I sat down, steadied the rifle on my knee, and
fired. The bullet hit at the junction of the neck
and shoulder, and I saw friend rhino change his
direction and walk steadily and deliberately
towards me. There is no accounting for the
ways of wild beasts. This rhino did not charge
in a blind, mad fit of fury as rhino generally do :
he just walked forward with a calmness as dis¬
concerting as it was curious. I had implicit
trust in my rifle, so I just sat my ground, ejected
the cartridge, and tried to ram another in the
breech. But try as I might the shell would not
go home. I had put a new magazine in the rifle
that morning, foolishly imagining that it was
all right, when as a matter of fact it was all wrong.
The rhino kept slowly advancing. Frantically
I renewed my efforts to get another cartridge
in the breech, but without avail. By this time
the rhino was so close that retreat seemed out
of the question, and I began to wonder what
rhinoceros horns would feel like in contact with
my ribs. And then|Elmi, who was carrying an
old Snider, let off his blunderbuss with a truly
deafening crack and a haze of smoke. I imagine
that the rhino received the leaden bullet, or else
got a very severe fright, for he gave a loud snort
and dashed past me into the bush. Elmi in
attempting to reload the Snider let the hammer
fall, and a bullet went singing past my head.
In disgust he gave the fearsome weapon to a
“ pagazi,” or porter, and off we went on the
spoor, Elmi unarmed.
I changed my magazine, wound the rifle sling
around my arm, and anticipated a charge. But
there was very little blood spoor, and we soon
got in amongst some dense bushes growing on
sandy soil where rhinoceroses appeared to have
walked by the score. There was a perfect maze
of tracks. Elmi followed along the freshest.
A few minutes elapsed, and suddenly I saw him
stop dead. A low hiss, a snort, and a scuffle,
and up jumped another rhino from amongst the
bushes where the beast had been asleep. She
gambolled away at an ugly shuffling trot for a
few yards, when I hit her just behind the shoulder.
This checked her career for a moment, and I
followed it up with three or four more shots, one
of which must have found the brain, and suddenly
she rolled over and breathed her last. I sent
a messenger back to camp to get porters to
carry in the meat and trophies. Meanwhile I
ate a frugal lunch under the sorry shade of a thorn
bush, whilst the sun glared down on the great
carcase and myriads of flies buzzed around it.
In the afternoon the porters arrived, and I was
by no means sorry to move off to sweeter-smelling
pastures.
Just before dusk, whilst stalking a gerenuk
ON GUARD : KIKUYU EL MORAN
To face p. 190
RETICULATED GIRAFFE; NORTHERN GUASO NYIRO RIVER

(Waller’s gazelle), Elmi sighted a fine bull giraffe
feeding on the topmost branches of a giant
acacia tree. There was little cover, and I had
therefore to take a long shot—about 230 yards.
By a great piece of luck for me and ill-fortune
for the giraffe, my first bullet smashed his shoulder.
It was a wonderful sight to see this great animal,
standing about 17 feet 4 inches high, sway and
topple to the ground. I was overjoyed at my
good fortune, and yet as the magnificent creature
fell and I realized that the murderous little bullet
had done its work, I felt a pang of pity and remorse.
It was indeed a study in destructive mania—
such a scene as the Plutonic gods must shudder
over when they have demolished a fair city with
one quake of the earth.
The giraffes of northern British East Africa
are of the reticulated variety. White markings
form a network on a reddish-liver-coloured back¬
ground, in contradistinction to the sporadic
dark brown blotches on a lighter-coloured skin
in the southern varieties.
As the red globe of the dying sun sank over
the western tree-tops that evening I saw half-a-
dozen giraffes, no doubt companions of my fallen
quarry, gallop off with ungainly strides into the
gloaming. The fiery sheen of the sun seemed
to swathe them in a crimson forest of flame. Tails
swishing, they ambled away, necks and bodies
swaying like grotesque rocking-horses. They
raised a cloud of desert dust and sand, and trees
and night quickly swallowed them up.
Close to the spot where I shot the bull I saw
no less than thirty-six giraffes two days after¬
wards. It was a wonderful sight—a scene which
can scarcely survive this generation of progress
and reclamation of the world’s wastes and deserts.
13
It may here be of interest to remark, that the
giraffe is the only one of the great quadrupeds
of Africa that is absolutely voiceless. I have never
heard one make any sound whatever, and they
are, I believe, quite incapable of doing so.
Could they speak they would, I imagine, hurl
well-chosen and well-merited invectives on the
puny mortals who take glory in shooting death¬
dealing bits of nickel into their colossal patchwork
hides.
A few miles from Kampi ya Nyama Yangu
is a little fort, surely one of the most desolate
of all the defences of the Empire. Some day,
if the unruly peoples of the North break through
the all-insufficient barriers of Moyali and Marsabit,
this cluster of huts, hemmed in by barbed wire,
and with one or two black “ askaris ” (police)
as custodians, may play a minor part in Colonial
tragedy, but for the present it is more of a store
and half-way house between Meru and Marsabit
than a Lilliputian Gibraltar. It is commonly
known as “ Archer’s Post,” because Mr. Geoffrey
Archer, the District Commissioner at Marsabit,
built it. Around here Grant’s gazelles were very
numerous, and the morning we passed the post
I strayed off the path and secured a very good
head of the species “ Notata.”
Wandering down the river, we one morning
met three or four Somalis tending camels. They
informed Elmi that lions had prowled around
them all night, and that they had just seen a
fine buffalo bull enter some sandy, bush-covered
ground away to the north. Elmi quickly picked
up the buffalo spoor, and before many minutes
had elapsed I had the great beast wounded.
He galloped off; but we soon came up with him
again, and after missing him badly with the *375
I brought him down with a couple of 480-grain
bullets in the lungs; and although at one time
he looked like charging, I secured a very fine
44§-inch head of a solitary old bull without
much difficulty. Camp was pitched right by
the Guaso and directly opposite a little ford
to the south bank. A few miles to the north a
great, rugged mountain known as Laishamunye
—the haunt of countless vultures frowned down
on us. Other igneous masses, dark and forbidding,
with serrated brows, towered up from the semi-
desert land, and far away to the south the snows
of Kenia were visible in the clear morning atmo¬
sphere. Along the banks of the Guaso palms
enlivened the view; but away from the river
the picture of lava rocks, desert sand, and thorn
scrub, all shimmering in the haze of merciless
heat, was sordid and dreary. To the south of
the river immense forests spread over the land¬
scape and hid much of its ugliness. Along the
fringes of this forest-land the full wealth of East
African fauna was to be seen. One day I watched
no less than sixty buffalo, the majority of them
bulls, standing on the edge of the belt of trees
and just above a little salt-pan. This pan
attracted enormous herds of wild animals —
giraffe, rhino, buffalo, oryx, Grant's gazelle,
Grevy's zebra, impala—-and, of course, with such
an abundance of game, lions were there in large
numbers. In the early morning the full majesty
of a leonine concert would reverberate and echo
until the rocky mountain masses seemed alive
with the most awe-inspiring music that human
ears can listen to.
A kill having been laid at the salt-pan one
night, we crossed over to the south bank of the
river early next morning, but unfortunately
too late to find the lions which had been there.
However, the Somalis soon picked up fresh spoor,
and the clever hunter-boys waxed eager and
excited. The Somalis are brave and fearless
to a degree—at least the great majority of them
are—and are also highly intelligent. Were it
not for their excitability they would make
absolutely ideal 46 shikaris.” We were following
in the track of a number of lions; spooring was
easy, and we marched along at a good pace.
At last, while approaching a tree-clad mass of
rocks, I heard a low grunt. We halted for a
moment, and then Cabara, frantic with the
passion of the hunt, rushed up the side of the
little hillock. We followed, and I saw tan-
coloured objects moving between the bushes.
The Somalis yelled 44 Shoot! shoot! 55 Foolishly
I allowed myself to be hurried by their yells,
and fired two shots in quick succession. To
my intense disgust both were clean misses !
The next instant a magnificent black-maned
lion burst cover and dashed away before I could
get my rifle-sight on him. Then for a moment
the bush appeared to be literally alive with lions.
Great yellow hound-shaped forms growled and
snarled and bolted in all directions. We had
walked almost into a large slumbering family
of Kings and Queens of beasts, attended by a
regular nursery of Princes and Princesses. I
singled out what I took to be a fair-sized lioness,
and had the satisfaction of hearing my bullet
get home. A wicked snarl followed, and the
animal dashed away. Elmi seized my arm and
implored me to shoot, saying I had wounded a
lioness and she was about to charge. I could
hear the angry growls and snarls, but strain my
eyes as I would I could not see the animal.
[To face p. 194
ELMI AND ORYX, BEISA ; NORTHERN GUASO NYIRO RIVER

!■
7
Elmi increased his frenzied supplications. I
felt almost on the point of apologizing to him
for my defective vision under such uncomfort¬
able circumstances when at last I made out
the shape of the brute, half-concealed behind a
broken tree-trunk. I lost no time in firing again,
for the position looked nasty, and I momentarily
expected the other lions to join in. The bullet
hit with a telling “ vup.” I followed it up with
another. There was a final ferocious grunt, and
then the tawny mass lay quite still.
We dashed on in the direction taken by the
rest of the troop. I would almost have given
my right arm for another sight of that great,
black-maned lion. But it was not to be. The
ground was rough and stony, the spoor was
exceedingly difficult to follow, and the troop had
made off at a great pace. Accordingly we
elected to return to the dead animal before the
ghoulish vultures commenced an impudent feast.
I was bitterly disappointed to find that my trophy
was a young lion, little more than half-grown,
instead of a full-grown lioness as Elmi and I had
both thought. Yellow lion-flies were buzzing
around the carcase, so we quickly skinned it and
returned to camp.
What most impressed me in that disappoint¬
ing hunt was my inability to see the wounded
animal, although looking straight at it. The
tawny colour of the skin blended so har¬
moniously with rocks and stunted yellow¬
leaved shrubs, that only a highly-trained eye
such as Elmi’s could immediately distinguish
between the lion and its surroundings. Never
had Nature’s law of protective environment
been brought home to me in such a remarkable
manner.
One afternoon I wandered east along the
Guaso, and sighted a fine herd of oryx feeding
out in the open, amidst some thorny aloes on
the sun-baked, sultry desert. There was one
particularly fine head amongst them, and after
a long, tiring stalk, I got in a fairly long shot
and saw the oryx go off wounded. I followed
him, and my next bullet smashed his shoulder.
He lay quite still, but when Elmi and I ap¬
proached him he thrust at us most viciously,
and the long, thin, sharp-pointed horns, over
thirty inches in length, cut the air like scimitars.
Elmi on one occasion sustained a serious injury
to his thigh through rushing in too hurriedly
on a wounded oryx (“ origis,” he used to call
them), and he was very prudent in approaching
these creatures afterwards. “ They are werry,
werry bad ! ” he would say; and indeed, unless
it be the roan or the sable, I know of no other
antelope that shows fight so readily and effectively
as the Oryx beisa.
Later I shot a dik-dik, a pretty little buck but
little bigger than a hare. There were thousands
of these diminutive animals to be seen amongst
the broken lava-rocks a little way from the banks
of the Guaso. They appear to have habits
somewhat akin to those of the klip-springer, and
have a very similar “ hedgehog ” coat. Elmi
had just picked up the dik-dik when I heard a
loud snort, and a rhino dashed out of the bush.
I hastily grabbed my rifle, but the great beast
stared stupidly at us for a few seconds and then
departed into the thorn-belt. I heaved a sigh
of thankfulness, as he, like the majority of the
Guaso Nyiro rhino, had very short horns, and
I had no wish to shoot him.
I had great luck that evening, for while
returning to camp Elmi saw a leopard stealthily
creeping cat-like among the rocks. He had
not seen us, so we crept very quietly up to
his feline lordship. Presently he lay down
and only the back of his head was visible
above the boulders. Resting my rifle on Elmi’s
shoulder, I took a careful sight. Bang ! and
the leopard turned and dashed straight up a tall
tree about sixty or seventy yards from us. As
he dashed past, Elmi in his excitement fired at
him with a charge of buckshot. In the tree he
presented a much easier mark. He was growling
and snarling most ferociously, but I cut his bad
language short with a bullet that dropped him.
He came to the ground with a thud, and lay at
the foot of the tree scowling fight at us. I have
a great respect for leopards, so I let him have
another bullet, and that finished his career.
A porter carried the carcase back to camp with
great difficulty, and next morning the beast was
skinned, and the 44 safari55 moved off up the
river again towards Kampi ya Nyama Yangu.
On the way I brought down a fine gerenuk ram.
The Waller’s gazelle (Lithocranius walleri), or
44 gerenuk,” as it is called by the Somalis,
although resembling the true gazelles in face-
markings, is entitled almost to constitute a
genus unto himself, so different is this curious
animal to the Grant’s, Thomson’s and Peter’s
gazelles of British East Africa, the springbuck of
South Africa, and the various other true gazelles
of Africa and Asia. One animal somewhat
closely resembles him, the dibatag, or Clarke’s
gazelle of Somaliland, but the gerenuk exhibits
even greater elongation of neck than the dibatag.
Whether seen with fore-legs planted high
against a tree-trunk and head thrust up amongst
boughs five or six feet from the ground, or
quietly stealing away into the friendly cover of
the bushes with neck out-thrust, the gerenuk is
as grotesque as he is interesting. In height he
averages about three feet three inches at the
shoulder, but his neck is of such extraordinary
length that sprigs and leaves growing almost
twice that height above the ground can be
reached by a full-grown ram by placing his
fore-legs against a tree. This curious character¬
istic is well known to the natives. One often
hears an East African “ pagazi55 or “ safari5 9
porter speak of the gerenuk as the “ twiga
kidogo,” or little giraffe. There are, as a matter
of fact, two or three points of resemblance
between these two animals, so vastly different
in bulk and colour. Both, for instance, are
possessed of extraordinary eyesight as well as
remarkable length of neck. Both, too, select
as their environment the fringes of desert land—
dry, arid, sandy country, sparsely covered with
bush.
In Somaliland and Northern British East
Africa gerenuk find their ideal conditions. During
my two weeks’ sojourn on the Northern Guaso
Nyiro river I saw large numbers of these
gazelles, and after a great deal of hard work and
many disappointments, I managed to secure
four “ Waller’s.” They are exceedingly in¬
quisitive and wary animals, and whilst apparently
not possessed of very keen scent, they seem to
be continually peering at you from over the tops
of short, stunted bushes. The long serpent¬
shaped necks of an indefinite rufous-fawn colour,
with horns fourteen or fifteen inches long, and
curved forward at the tips (in the males only)
surmounting them, are generally all that one
sees, as the wily animal seldom allows his pursuer
to come within seventy or eighty yards of him.
Until one has actually slain his gerenuk it is
difficult to realize what a remarkable length of
neck there is, and the shoulder shot when fired
at a covered mark generally goes high. The
neck itself is exceedingly thin and difficult to
hit, especially in tangled bush. Moreover, the
smash of a bullet spoils the trophy in the case
of a gerenuk or dibatag, if hit in the neck,
much more so than in the case of any other
animal.
Shot after shot I missed at these beasts, and
although I stalked them for hours at a time, it
was some days before one at last fell to my rifle.
Unfortunately this was a doe, which I mistook
for a ram, some stunted thorn-tree boughs
immediately behind her making it appear that
she carried horns. The next evening, however,
I shot a good ram carrying 13f-inch horns,
and a few days later secured two more males,
one with a 14§-inch head, which is well-nigh up
to the top record of British East Africa, though
considerably below the best for Somaliland,
where horns go up to as much as seventeen
inches. Still I was exceedingly pleased at getting
these specimens, as I consider that any one may
well be proud of securing any kind of gerenuk
head. Hunting these elusive animals calls for
exercise of those qualities of patience, eyesight
and judgment, which are the stock-in-trade of
a big-game hunter, in a greater degree than almost
any other antelope that graces the African
continent.
North of the Guaso Nyiro is a great desert
land sparsely peopled by nomads—Rendile and
Borani shepherds, Somali and Abyssinian traders
and raiders. On our return from the Guaso to
Nairobi we met an enormous caravan of Borani
traders returning home after taking down a lot
of ponies for the horse-dealers of the Protectorate.
There were more than sixty camels, and as the
animals moved slowly past us with their necks
outstretched to their native north, and that look
of infinite suffering and resignation which a
camel always bears, the wooden bells around
their necks tinkled and clouds of dust rose off
the dry, sandy soil, and blew away to the greener
pastures around Kenia. We were returning
to Nairobi by a route different to that by
which we had reached the Guaso. This time
our steps were set towards Nyeri—we were going
to complete a circle around the mountain—and
we began to notice a change in the fauna.
Giraffe became much scarcer, and the handsome
Grevy’s zebra was replaced by the more common
type of BurchelPs.
Here, too, we saw our last gerenuk. A little
farther on an old Jackson’s hartebeeste bull was
observed running with a herd of oryx. Then
Thomson’s gazelle—those pretty little antelopes
which are for ever whisking their bushy tails and
are commonly known as 44 Tommies ”—began to
be fairly plentiful. About half-way on the
march to Nyeri from the river, I shot rather a
fine specimen of a Serval cat. They are savage
little beasts, handsomely marked and almost
miniature leopards in appearance and disposition.
The great adventure of this trek, however,
was a lion and leopard hunt in an immense
swamp about five days from Nyeri. There was
a good deal of spoor around, and as nearly all
the tracks seemed to lead towards this great
mass of high-growing reeds and dense grass, it
appeared that the swamp was likely to yield
some good sport. It very nearly yielded tragedy.
Two porters, one a Kavirondo and the other a
Wanyamwezi, were badly mauled by an enormous
lioness whilst beating the reeds. At first all
the efforts of the beaters, despite frenzied yells
and trumpets improvised out of oryx horns, were
of no avail. The only animal that bolted from
cover was a bush-buck. Mohamed, the Somali
headman, then had the reeds fired. The flames
came tearing down the swamp, crackling and
roaring with the madness of the fire. A lioness
suddenly rose almost from beneath the feet of
the porters. A Wanyamwezi foolishly hit her
full between the eyes with a heavy stick. In¬
stantly she turned on him, and her cruel claws
tore his wrist and hand as though they had been
pieces of string and matchwood instead of muscle
and bone. Then the brute dashed at a Kavirondo
and fixed her fangs in his arm. At once the
swamp was alive with yelling natives and Somalis
screaming at the top of their voices, their fuzzy
hair blowing in the wind like the locks of madmen.
The fire came rushing on, and I stationed myself
on the edge of the swamp and close to where,
according to a half-breed Masai-Kikuyu porter,
the lioness was lying up. With an ugly sound—
partly a grunt, partly a snarl, and partly a belch
—a magnificent lioness bounded away into the
swamp before the oncoming flames. As she
rose I fired at her with my *375, and think I hit
her, but rather far back. Elmi swore that she
was hard hit.
The next encounter with her was on the outer
fringe of the swamp. She lay crouching under¬
neath a fair-sized bush, but for the life of me,
I could not make the brute’s form out. At last,
however, I saw what I fancied was her De¬
moniacal Majesty, and I sent a bullet into the
crouching, almost concealed shape. The lioness
rose from the bush like a rocket, bounded a full
ten feet into the air and dashed away. I
missed her badly as she galloped towards the
unburned portions of the swamp. Then followed
some very skilful spooring on the part of Elmi
and Okote (one of the Kavirondo 44 askaris ”).
I was looking straight ahead at a dense clump of
bushes when something caught my eye. It was
the tail of the lioness, swishing slowly to and fro.
Again I fired, and again to my great disappoint¬
ment the animal bounded off. We now followed
her across a little stream up to the edge of the
burning reeds, but where or how she had gone it
was impossible to tell. I was peering into a
clump of unburnt bushes when Elmi clutched
me by the shoulder and whispered 44 Leopard ! 55
Looking to where his finger pointed, I saw a
crouching mass of tawny skin and black spots,
but where lay head and where tail I could not
discover. However, it was not a time for
investigation. I had nearly stumbled on the
brute, so I fired at once, and had the satisfaction
of hearing the bullet hit with a resounding 44 vup.”
But my luck was all out that afternoon, for the
leopard, too, sneaked away into the dense bushes.
After him we went; and with a wounded lioness
mad with blood and fury and fright, and a wounded
leopard in that acre or two of covert, and with
a roaring bush-fire burning and crackling all
around us, I must confess it was quite as exciting
an experience as ever I wish for. At last I
espied the leopard crouching flat on the ground.
I quickly put two bullets into him, and the boys
dragged him out—a very fine specimen with the
pads of his feet scorched by the flames. Of the
lioness I saw nothing more. She evaded the
flames and her pursuers somehow, and though
badly wounded she got clean away. The next
morning we went right through the unburned
portion of the swamp, thinking she might be
lying up there, but it was of no avail.
The two mauled 44 boys ” were bandaged and
their wounds bathed with corrosive sublimate
and permanganate of potash. The Wanyamwezi
quickly recovered, but the Kavirondo had to be
taken to the Nyeri Hospital and left in charge
of the Indian attendant there. He was making
fair progress, however, and wept when I told
him that he could not continue on the 44 safari,5’
but would have to be medically treated until
the bites of the lioness had healed. It is wonderful
how quickly the most fearful cuts and tears
heal up in a native. The wounds the unfortunate
Kavirondo sustained would probably have meant
death to the majority of white men, but I feel
quite certain that to-day he is none the worse
for his mauling.
On the open plains outside Nyeri, we enjoyed
some good sport with Jackson’s hartebeeste
and Thomson’s gazelle. There was, however,
not a great deal of game around there, and what
there was took a tremendous amount of stalking,
for it was very, very wild and shy. One after¬
noon I had a hard hunt after 44 Jackson’s ” or
44 kongoni ”—all hartebeeste are spoken of as
44 kongoni ” by the East African natives. The
herd was not a large one, and the old sentry bull
was exceedingly wary. To make matters more
difficult, a huge troop of zebra would insist on
manoeuvring round and round the suspicious
antelope. Of course whenever I managed to
get within range of the Jackson's the zebra would
tear off with a gallop that shook the earth, and
away would go the Jackson's with them. At
length, after trudging miles and miles, I got a
long shot at a cow and dropped her with a bullet
through the heart. It was well-nigh dark, and
when I returned to camp at the Rongui River
night had fallen over the land, and, although on
the Equator, it was most bitterly cold. To the
east and above us Kenia raised her snow-draped
head, and the blasts that blew from off her
frozen summit were like the winds of the Pole.
It was indeed a six-blanket climate, and woe
betide the unknowing man who may hunt on the
Nyeri plains with a mosquito net and a counter¬
pane as his bedclothes !
From Nyeri the 46 safari59 marched through
the southern foothills of Kenia and into Fort
Hall. A few miles farther on we boarded the
Fort Hall motor 'bus, and arrived at the Norfolk
Hotel about two o'clock in the morning, after
one of the most cramped and tiring rides it has
ever been my unfortunate lot to endure. Two
days later the porters arrived in charge of
Mohamed the headman, who, as a great privilege,
had been allowed to ride my Abyssinian pony.
Mohamed had managed to give the willing little
animal a sore back, for which I cursed him
roundly.
After our sojourn in the wilds, Nairobi, with
its stone-built offices and residences and iron-
roofed stores, seemed a colossal place—almost
a metropolis, in fact. And yet, although it is
the capital of the East African Protectorate,
it cannot (or could not at the time of which I
write) boast of one thousand white inhabitants.
Its population for the greater part consists of
IN A SAMBURU “ MANYATTA
[To face p. 204

ELMI AND GERENUK RAM
Indians, Somalis, natives who have had the
edges of their savagery blunted ever so little,
and the coloured riff-raff of the East Coast. It
is a town that exudes ghee and the odours of
Asia, and with its bazaars and bungalows, and
helmets and puttees, it has more of the appear¬
ance of India than Africa. Nairobi has a subtle
fascination of its own, as, indeed, has the whole
of British East Africa.
There are few countries on the face of the
globe that captivate so readily as the East
African Protectorate. And the fascination does
not wear off. Absence can make the heart grow
fonder in the case of places as well as of people.
The longer you stay away from East Africa the
stronger becomes the power of the spell. It is
a lovely as well as a very remarkable country.
The English aristocrat and the Kikuyu 44 shenzi ”
(savage) rub shoulders in this wonderful land
where everything is vast and large and free.
You may observe a man, bronzed and bearded,
with hair falling over his shoulders, bare-kneed
and bare-chested, horny-handed and dirty. If
you saw such a person in your garden in England
you would immediately set the bulldog on him.
But on inquiry you may ascertain that this
individual whom you see labouring on the great
escarpments or the rolling plains is Lord So-
and-So. Blanket-clad and clay-smeared, with
spear in hand, there stands beside him Yanga
Yanga, a Wakamba savage. It is a country
of more than ordinary attractions that makes
this possible. And you may leave East Africa
and seek your gilded joys in the bustle of the
world’s highways, but East Africa will call
you back. The latest aesthetic dancers of St.
Petersburg may please you, but there will come
a deep, all-powerful longing to see in their stead

two hundred Kikuyu spearmen. You may enjoy
your supper at the Savoy, but you cannot deceive
yourself : the tough kongoni steak devoured on
the Thika River was far better.
CHAPTER XIII
BRITISH EAST AFRICA (CONTINUED) :

ON SAFARI TO SOTIK
Down the western edge of the Kikuyu escarp¬

ment the train came snorting and puffing, as
though terrified of some unseen foe that hunted it
along the metal road of the Uganda Railway.
Below us the last golden lights of the sun lingered
on that immense ditch on the face of Africa,
which extends from Lake Nyasa to the Dead
Sea, and is known as the Great Rift Valley.
Out of evening haze and gathering gloom there
loomed up the crater masses of Longonot and
Suswa, and in the fast-darkening foreground
Mount Margaret took rugged shape. The loco¬
motive twisted around a bend in the highway
that leads to Victoria Nyanza, and above us
tall cedar trees and the dense bush which gives
cover to the shy bongo antelope, seemed as the
outlines of a phantom garden tended by giants
of the air. Down, down, down the train dashed,
over Yankee-built viaducts, twisting, curving,
ever descending till it halted exhausted at
Kijabe at the foot of the cliff.
The last tinges of red and gold and ochre had
died in the western sky, and it was with lanterns
and much peering that we bundled our porters,
Somali servants, ponies and impedimenta out of
the train. Kijabe means 66 the wind,5’ and the
place is well named. Behind the little station
207 14
rises Kijabe mountain, one of the lesser guardians
of snow-capped Kenia—queen of East African
peaks. Kijabe seems to be set in the centre
of a giant funnel down which storms and gusts are
for ever blowing, and the mountain does not
break the force of these winds, it merely serves
to distribute the air eddies and send them
whirling around the camp of any traveller who
may pass that way. However, such things as
tents being blown down or fired by drifting
sparks, are mere humorous incidents when one
is going a-hunting after big game.
We had elected to start away from this
tempestuous little place on our journey to
Sotik—a vast and little-settled district of British
East Africa that abuts on the northern frontier
of German territory. A few weeks before Rainey,
the American, and his pack of hounds had
accounted for twenty-six lions in this part of the
Protectorate, and with a view to having a share
of the excellent sport which we were assured was
to be obtained there, we had hired a wagon and
a span of oxen. To reach the Sotik country one
has to travel over a 66 thirst-belt ”—a country
where, at the time of the year we set out on our
journey (October), water is exceedingly scarce,
and long marches have to be made.
On our journey to the North we had a 44 safari ”
(caravan) of close on a hundred porters, gun-
bearers, personal servants, syces, etc., but for
this expedition we deemed it better to travel
with only ten porters and six Somali attendants—
three gun-bearers, a syce, a personal servant and
a headman. The African 44 pagazi ” (carrier) is
but a poor beast of burden in a dry, waterless
country, and the hiring of an ox-wagon seemed
by far and away the best method of reaching
the Southern Guaso Nyiro River, which runs

through some of the best Sotik game country.
The morning after our arrival at Kijabe we came
to terms with Mr. Postma in the matter of
transport, gave directions for the wagon to wait
for us on the eastern side of Mount Margaret,
saddled up and rode off. We soon began to see
a little game—ungainly Coke’s hartebeestes, a
few pig and a herd or two of Grant’s gazelle.
But they were all very wild, and it was not till
late evening that I managed to bring down a
Grant’s gazelle of the variety “ Typica.” I had
been after this herd for an hour or more on the
western side of Mount Margaret.
Time after time they had fled in precipitous
fear just as I was on the point of firing at a ram
with what seemed a particularly good pair of
horns. Five or six little Thomson’s kept hover¬
ing round the Grant’s, and acted the annoying
part of sentinels. I crawled and crept after the
desired trophy, taking advantage of every particle
of cover in the shape of bushes and grass tussocks
that offered. But time after time, too, the
“ Tommies ” anticipated my shot and, with
tails perpetually flicking from side to side, they
would dash away, attended, of course, by the
Grant’s. There are few things more tantalizing
in big-game hunting than this. Zebra are a
particular nuisance in every part of Africa where
large wild animals abound, and many and many
a time I have cursed them with all the vehemence
I could lay my tongue to. Often when about to
take an easy shot at some particularly coveted
antelope, I have heard the ground thunder
with the sound of hundreds of galloping hoofs,
and a great drove of striped horses has dashed
away towards the sky-line, and with them the
Jackson’s hartebeeste, or the oryx, or whatever
I was stalking at the time has gone madly away.
But sometimes the warning is quite silent.
The guardian animals that you do not want to
shoot seem to realize their safety, and you may
be wholly hidden from the game you are after
and with the wind absolutely in your favour.
Then it is, I believe, that wild animals employ
some form of sympathetic telepathy. The
animals in safety signal across a silent warning to
their friends in jeopardy, and you sight your
rifle on a cloud of dust. I do not think this is
a far-fetched idea. After all, what do we know
of the reasoning of the animal mind, we who
cannot understand our own?
When the Thomson’s gazelle had scurried
away, I increased my efforts to get the 44 Grant’s,”
especially as the day was beginning to wane and
camp was a long way off. At last I saw the
three rams I had been pursuing for so long
standing together, alternately cropping at the
grass on the plains, and raising their graceful
heads in search of danger. It seems terrible
and cruel that the fairest of God’s wild creatures
should live in an everlasting agony of fear:
terror of the slaughtering maniacs who carry a
rifle by day; terror of the prowling lion, the foul,
cunning leopard, or the cheetah—the animal that
kills its prey by strangulation—when darkness
has sent the big-game hunter to his bed. But it
is a decree of Creation, a decree as pitiless as
it is unalterable, and all the antelopes in Africa
outside of “ zoos ” and the two-mile sanctuary of
the Uganda Railway have come to realize it.
These were not my reflections, however, as
I crept up behind the cover of a bush to the
three rams. At such times one can only think
[To face %> 210
ELMI AND FEMALE GERENUK
■
in terms of game and shooting. Some unhappy
incident must have caused the Grant’s to look
for danger in exactly the opposite direction to
the fateful bush. I got within about eighty yards
of the trio and steadied my rifle, elbow on knee.
For a moment the dying glare of the sun blinded
me. Then I saw the three rams had their heads
turned to the last glory of the day. One suddenly
whipped around and snorted, but before he
could move my bullet sped into the neck of the
finest gazelle and he toppled over dead. It was
then that Elmi, my Somali hunter-boy, dashed
up from behind me and cut the head and neck
off while I rode through the dusk to the wagon
and the cheerful fires that burned around it.
This Grant’s gazelle was of the “ Typica ”
variety—Gazella granti Typica. The horns are
very long and lyrate, and are more divergent
than those of the u Notata ” species, which
I had seen in great numbers between Mount
Kenia and the Abyssinian frontier. They lack
the spread of the 64 Robertsi ” variety—a species
of buck which we saw and shot in Sotik—but
they make very handsome trophies. Indeed
I know of no buck in Africa which for its size
—a Grant’s averages about thirty-three inches
at the shoulders—carries such a large and sym¬
metrical head as this noble and stately gazelle.
One has to be a sound sleeper to slumber
peacefully on an ox-wagon, travelling a rough
path. But a hard day’s hunting on an African
plain is a wonderfully potent sleeping-draught;
and though the wagon bumped terrifically over
tree-stumps, bolted down the side of a dried-up
ravine, and staggered and trembled as the brow
on the other side was gained, I was soon as deep
in the arms of Morpheus as I should have been
between sheets at the Norfolk Hotel—the hos¬
telry plus grande magnijique of the East African
Protectorate. The oxen were inspanned about
ten o’clock, and we travelled during the cool
hours of the night. Dawn found our wandering
home rumbling along over the little beaten and
broken roadway that leads to Sotik. In the
steel-grey light we could discern the forms of
Longonot to the right and Suswa nearer on our
left. Before us were hills, and then a great
table-shaped ridge of land that ran along the
leaden sky-line until it disappeared in the dim
dawn—it was the Mau. Behind us the Kikuyu
escarpment stood out black and sombre like
a giant black cloud-bank. We were travelling
through a great trough, one of the subsidiary
rents in the Rift Valley.
Brighter and brighter grew the east. A blush
of pink, delicate and beautiful, seemed to do
battle with the sullen, steely frown of daybreak.
I watched the contest idly and waited to see
dawn win the day and proclaim her victory in
gorgeous tints and colourings.
Then I slid down from the wagon, rifle in hand,
and shouted to Elmi to follow. Out on the
plain shapes were moving, galloping, running
or walking quietly along. As the light grew
better I could see great herds of tawny-coloured,
ungainly-looking antelopes—Coke’s hartebeestes,
perhaps the most common animals of British
East Africa. Zebra were there, too, in great
numbers; and in the early daylight they ap¬
peared the colour of modern British ironclads—
the colour of Navy paint. On the other side
of the path half-a-dozen stately Grant’s gazelle
rushed madly away towards Longonot, dis¬
turbed by the groaning and straining of the
lumbering wagon and the hoarse shouts of our

Masai wagon-driver. With them, of course, gal¬
loped a host of 44 Tommies,” their rich rufous
brown coats and white tails giving them a
particularly handsome appearance in the fresh
morning light.
Clearly I must get ahead of the wagon; the
noise of the cumbersome vehicle jolting and
bumping along was enough to frighten away game
for miles around. Yet in the early morn, buck
are less suspicious, and are more easily ap¬
proached than when the sun is high. So it was
that after calling to Burru, my Somali syce,
to bring my Abyssinian pony, I rode a little
ahead of the wagon and found the plain abso¬
lutely covered with game. It was a scene such
as is to be viewed in exceedingly few parts of
the world to-day, and it recalled to my mind
the sporting classics of Cornwallis Harris and
Gordon Gumming—those men who were fortunate
enough to see South Africa in its natural state
before the unsightly miles of barbed wire
and galvanized iron ousted the springbuck,
the wildebeeste and the gemsbok. There was
a vast group of hartebeeste families, old bulls,
their heads raised in watchful interest, younger
bulls close to the patriarchal watchers, cows
and fawns behind. There a battalion of zebra
faced me and snorted with fear and curiosity.
Grant’s gazelle in countless troops, 44 Tommies ”
well-nigh as plentiful as stunted tussocks of
grass—it was indeed a wondrous spectacle.
66 Wuff! wuff! wuff! ” the matutinal grunts
of a lion away in the Suswa foothills reminded
me that there were sterner members of fauna
on the plains than antelope that morning.
That sound so clearly vibrated across the pure,
still morning air might be within one hundred
yards, so distinct does it seem, but, as a matter
of fact, that lion is at least five or six miles
distant.
I had now wandered a long way to the right
of the track being pursued by the wagon, and
confined my attentions to some 44 Tommies.55
There was absolutely no cover, and where the
Thomson’s gazelle were frolicking around the
land was as flat as the surface of a billiard-table.
The sun was mounting high in the heavens,
and I quickly made up my mind to resort to
tactics other than crawling snake-like along the
ground. Keeping the suspicious Thomson’s in
the corner of my eye, I commenced to walk in a
circle around them with my head turned away
from the gazelles, as though I took no interest
in them whatever. At first the radius of my
circle, with the 44 Tommies ” as the centre, was,
perhaps, two hundred yards. Gradually I de¬
creased this radius, still walking slowly and
unconcernedly around. The gazelles in the centre
went on feeding, and now and then the rams
would throw up their stately little heads, or gaze
at me, half, I suppose, in fear, half in wonder at
my peregrinations. At last I had decreased
my circle to about one hundred and twenty
yards radius. I quietly sat down, and just as
the best ram was about to bolt I got him right on
the shoulder with a lead-nosed express bullet that
put a speedy end to his cogitations and fright.
Where no cover offers this circuitous plan
often acts very satisfactorily. I have tried it
with tsessebe on the great Bangweolo plains in
British Central Africa with good results, and in
the East African Protectorate most of my
44 Tommies ” were obtained in this way. It is
said that the red man of North America devised

this scheme of getting within bow-and-arrow
range of game on open plains, but as a matter of
fact it is one of those instinctive methods that
are part and parcel of the hunting brain, and you
may be quite sure that the Bushman and Bantu
in Africa have dealt death in this manner for
quite as many years as the Sioux.
A word as to the Thomson’s gazelle. This
handsome little animal is an inhabitant of the
interior districts of British and German East
Africa. In colour the 64 Tommy ” is a deep
sandy rufous, with sharply defined markings,
a central deep rufous face streak, and a narrow
black band bordering the white on the sides of
the rump. A full-grown male stands about
twenty-six inches high at the shoulder, and
weighs at a rough estimate half a hundredweight.
It is a pretty sight to view a family of 44 Tommies ”
feeding on the vast, open grass plains of East
Africa. Tails for ever twitching from side to
side, the beautiful rich hue of their bodies shows
up handsomely against the verdant background.
When alarmed, they race over the ground in
sharp, quick gallops, but as soon as they consider
they have placed a fair distance between them¬
selves and their pursuers, they immediately
begin grazing again. The rams are pugnacious
little creatures, and seem to be for ever doing
battle between one another. Rivals for a doe’s
favours will charge like 44 knights so bold in days
of old.” There is a woman in the case even on
the Suswa plains.
About midday the wagon was drawn up along¬
side one of two trees that threw no shade, and
the hot, thirsty oxen were outspanned. There
was a pool a couple of hundred yards off, and to
this the tired animals immediately made their
way. Vast herds of game drank their fill morning
and evening at this muddy puddle, so that the
water we drew from it was anything but a
healthy-looking beverage. The sun poured down
with a merciless glare. Even the wood of the
wagon seemed burning hot, and to touch metal
was to endure torture. Around us stretched the
vast flats of the Kedong Valley, and the earth
seemed to dance and vibrate in the sheen and
fire of the sun’s rays. Just in front were a
number of rugged rocks, and beyond the escarp¬
ment of the Mau told of a stiff climb to come.
It seemed only fitting during those burning
hours that Longonot and Suswa should take on
crater shapes, for it was as though the air was
charged with cinders hurled from depths pyro-
genous. Longonot is a mountain whereof many
weird tales are told. It is the Erebus of the
Masai, and is held to harbour spirits, devils and
snakes in its crater mouth. Wherefore it is
spoken of in bated breath, and regarded with
a reverent and awed fear.
The whole of this immense rift in East Africa
is a land of spirits and hobgoblins and supersti¬
tions to the native mind, and a region wonderful
and fearful in the eyes of modern science. It
gave to Rider Haggard suggestions for his
fiction in Allan Quatermain, since it is said by
the Masai, that at the west end of Lake Naivasha
there is a subterranean passage that leads to
a land peopled by inhabitants with white faces.
There is, in truth, a great tunnel on the Mau side
of this beautiful sheet of water, and perchance
Nature has burrowed a warren deep below the
grand escarpments, whereof the western gate is
in the Victoria Nyanza. It is a valley that has
a wonderful history in the geological pages of
Nature; and though Longonot and the other
eminences in the trough have ceased to spit forth
fire and ashes, even to-day the valley sometimes
exhibits phenomena such as local shrinkage and
upheaval, which have perplexed such men of
learning as have had occasion to visit there.
That afternoon I strolled a few yards away
from the camp with Elmi. Espying a herd of
“ Tommies 55 feeding on the plain, we made a
wide detour, and, creeping up behind some rocks,
I saw the stately little gazelles feeding peacefully
in front of me. I singled out a doe that carried
quite a remarkable pair of horns for a female.
It was an easy shot, and the antelope fell over
stone dead.
It was cold and barely light the next morning
when we left our blankets and trudged to beyond
the water-hole, where a kill had been laid below
the rugged rocks. As we neared the brow of
the rise we crept down, for the morning light
was beginning to flood the plain, and it was
necessary to approach with extreme caution.
Cabara, one of the Somali gun-bearers, with his
usual excitability, suddenly jumped up, and in
a hoarse whisper that could have been heard
a mile away, said something about “ lions.”
The two other Somalis shouted “ Shoot! Shoot!55
and thrust my rifle into my hands. Yes, there
was certainly something at the zebra, but already
the animal was toddling away as fast as his
night’s gorge would allow. And then just as
Cabara and Elmi together muttered “ Fire ! ”
in a tone of colossal disgust, I perceived that the
marauder was nothing more than a scavenging
hyaena. Many and many a time have I been
disappointed in this way. In the early morning
the beast of prey crouches down on his haunches
and has a last long and lingering taste of the
entrails of his kill. It is at first often very
difficult to distinguish what the half-hidden
carnivore really is, and more than once I have
felt my heart leap with joy, only to find a moment
afterwards that what might have been the
King of Beasts was only a slinking cur, an
animal that is held in contempt all over Africa.
But big-game hunting, like every other game
worth playing, has many disappointments as
well as joys, so I watched the brute till he
was well-nigh out of sight, sent a final curse
after him, and then returned to camp and
breakfast.
The sun was high above the frowning ridge
of the Kikuyu escarpment when we moved
onwards again towards the wall of the Mau.
Somewhat refreshed by an eighteen hours5 halt,
the oxen were driven from the muddy pool that
had proved the elixir of life to them, and were
yoked in. Jusef Jama, our Somali headman,
soon had the impedimenta aboard the wagon,
or on the heads of the 44 pagazis 55 (porters), and
with much rumbling and creaking we started
off again. Our wagon driver was a little Masai,
who had gained his knowledge of 44 dusselbooms 55
and 44 yokeskeys 55 with a small colony of South
African farmers who had settled in the Kedong
Valley; and an admirable driver he proved
himself. He had acquired an extensive vocabu¬
lary of Dutch words such as are generally used
by transport riders in the Transvaal and the
Free State. The majority of these epithets are
quite unprintable, but they seem to work
wonders with oxen. In fact, Dutch is the only
language which cattle, mules and donkeys
appear to understand. Dutch is the lingua

franca of the beasts of burden.
I stayed behind the wagon for some time that
morning in order to stalk a small herd of Grant’s
gazelle. One ram among them appeared to
carry an uncommonly fine head, and after much
manoeuvring I at last got in a good 64 end on ”
shot, and brought him down with a bullet that
raked him through from stern to neck. The
horns were indeed a prize—beautifully lyrate in
shape and substantially longer than those secured
two evenings before. Chama, our third gun-
bearer, dexterously skinned the head and neck
and shouldered the trophies. After an hour’s
hard tramp I found Burru, my Somali syce,
waiting for me alongside the Sotik road with my
Abyssinian pony. I mounted and soon caught
up with the wagon.
All day we travelled onwards; onwards and
upwards, for we had begun the ascent of the great
Mau escarpment—one of those giant corruga¬
tions that robe the geography of the East African
Protectorate in a colossal suit of corduroys.
Game became less and less plentiful, and each
little valley and donga was as dry as a bone;
we were getting into Thirst-land. The porters
had been told to fill up all the available canvas
water-carriers and bottles at the previous night’s
camping-place, but with that lack of forethought
which is characteristic of the African native, they
had omitted to do so. Late in the afternoon
they came to us and whined for water. But the
supply in the drums on the wagon was very small,
and as the next few days’ march was an unknown
quantity to us, we refused to give them a drop.
They had to pay the penalty for their irre¬
sponsibility, disobedience and laziness with a
vengeance, for the heat was intense and the march
long, trying and dusty. Just before dusk we
camped on the spur of a hill about half-way up
the side of the Mau. One of the porters assured
us that he could find water in the vicinity. After
a protracted search he succeeded, and ere long
masters, servants, horses and oxen were all
in a deep slumber.
It was about three o’clock in the morning
when we inspanned the oxen and began to
climb the last crags of the Mau. By the light
of lanterns and firebrands our Somalis and
servants packed the various items of impedi¬
menta away on the wagon, and at last we satisfied
ourselves that nothing was left behind, and the
rumbling and creaking of the wagon, the strain¬
ing of the oxen and the hoarse yells of the drivers
told that another day’s 44 trek ” had commenced.
Bumping over tree-stumps, rocking and shaking
as great ruts in the track were crossed, we at
last reached the summit. By this time the sun
had risen and flooded the escarpment, the great,
dreary plateau that lay ahead of us, and the
valley of the Kedong now in the dim distance in
warmth and splendour. There was practically
no game to be observed on this table-land, but
now and then we saw giraffe, their long, giant
necks standing up like mammalian spectres
above the dried grass and stunted shrubs of the
arid plateau. At mid-day the wagon began the
descent of a rugged, stony ravine, where at
certain favoured times a stream must have
coursed. Elmi went up the banks to see if he
could discover any water, that priceless com¬
modity whereof no one can realize the true value
till he has searched for it with parched throat
in the wastes of Africa and has failed to find it.
It was an abominable spot, this dry ravine of
fiery heat. The water in the wagon drums was
running very short, and it was therefore with
considerable relief that we at last heard Elmi
return and shout the comforting word 66 maji! 59
(water!). In truth, there was very little of it,
but such as there was sufficed to appease the
thirsty 44 safari ” for a time, and in the afternoon
we travelled on again.
At dusk we reached a little flowing stream.
It was a most sorry apology for a rivulet, but it
was the first trickle of running water that we
had seen for several days, and its appearance was
in refreshing contrast to the few dirty, muddy
pools along the line of march from Kijabe.
The next day we reached the broader waters
of Ongorra Narok. It was close to this river,
which boasts of a full-blooded Masai name, that
I had an uncomfortable experience with that
diabolical thing the 44 jigger flea.55
I had been stalking some Thomson’s gazelle,
and a long thorn had run into the side of one of
my canvas boots. I had pulled the thorn out
of my foot and was just putting my sock on
again when I heard an exclamation from Elmi.
The next instant he was kneeling by my side and
pointed with the thorn to my big toe. 44 This
very bad, sir,55 he muttered, and I then for the
first time noticed a peculiar round and ball¬
shaped swelling by the side of the nail.
Instantly it flashed across my mind what this
curious protuberance signified.
44 Jigger ? 55 I queried.
64 Yes,” answered Elmi. 44 Jigger. Him very
bad. Take him out quick,” and forthwith he
dug out the bag of flea eggs with the thorn,
leaving a big hole which pained considerably.
But it would have been much worse had the
operation been delayed, for the 44 jigger,95 like
another African curse, the 44 buffalo bean,99 must
have been created in a moment of vindictiveness
against mankind in general. Toes have some¬
times to be amputated as a result of this devilish
little insect. Wherefore, you who may tread the
earth of lesser-known Africa, beware the44 jigger! ”
Wear thick boots and have a periodical toe
inspection !
We left the Ongorra Narok about three o’clock
in the cool of the morning, and shortly after
daybreak reached the Guaso Nyiro river, an
unbeautiful stream flowing through a dry and
fly-plagued country, with here and there a few
mournful trees standing up to break the mono¬
tony of the plain, and in the background great,
inhospitable, stony hills. We found a store on
the south bank, a ramshackle establishment
presided over by a solitary young South African.
I do not envy him his lot. We partook of his
hospitality in the shape of fried eggs, and then
marched out on to the plain covered with wilde-
beeste, hartebeeste, Grant’s and Thomson’s
gazelles, to a water-hole, where we established
our camp.
I find the 16th of October recorded as a red-
letter day in my diary. It was somewhat late
when I left the camp by the water-hole; and,
attended by Elmi and a couple of porters, rode
towards the Guaso Nyiro. We had not gone
a mile before sighting a great herd of white-
bearded gnu picking at the sun-dried herbage of
the plain. A belt of leafless shrubs intervened
between us and them, and I crept up to this line
of cover, intent on achieving better success than
had been my lot the day before, when I had
missed a good wildebeeste bull very badly.
Some of the wildebeeste pranced madly forward
and were soon raising a cloud of dust as they
headed towards the river. But other members
of the herd—there were about forty of them
altogether—stood their ground, and with snorts
of fear and curiosity raised their shaggy heads and
gazed in my direction.
One animal appeared to stand out prominently
among the others. It may have been that he
was closer, it may have been that he was the
finest member of the congregation, but I made
up my mind in a moment that this was an animal
worth trying for. Creeping behind one of the
withered bushes, I got a steady sight on his
shoulders just about a hundred and thirty yards
away. As soon as one pulls the trigger one
knows, after much hunting and shooting, whether
the murderous little missile has got home or not.
Instinctively I felt I had recorded a hit almost
before the bullet had left the rifle barrel, and I
was far less surprised than pleased when I saw
the gnu lying on the ground, his legs giving
a few convulsive kicks.
Elmi dashed up to him in high glee, and the
porters, as usual, beamed at the prospect of
more 44 nyama ”—the amount of meat an African
can stow away under his black hide has always
been a source of unalloyed amazement to me.
He was a good bull with a remarkable breadth
of horn around the base. He lay there on the
weary flatness of the Loita Plain, quite still
and silent; and the sun, now high in the heavens,
poured down on his carcase, while the blood
bubbled slowly out of the hole that went deep
into his heart, and ended In a mangled mass
of blood and lead and nickel.
15
It is a curious contradiction of desire and
thought that fills the breast of the big-game
hunter—unless he be built of stone and adamant—
after such an incident as this. The lust of
killing is only satiated by the falling crash of
some truly magnificent and ponderous quadruped,
and then there inevitably comes a wave of pity
and regret. Yet ten minutes afterwards, when
I espied two fine Grant’s, their graceful heads
raised in suspicion and the spread of their horns
standing clear and distinct against the sky-line,
there returned this demon of slaughter. To cut
a long and uninteresting story of stalks and shots
short, I at last secured both of these. Another
fine wildebeeste bull also fell to my rifle that
morning, and I returned to camp a butcher
unashamed of his butchery.
CHAPTER XIV
BRITISH EAST AFRICA (CONTINUED) : MORE

HUNTING IN SOTIK—KIJABE MOUNTAIN
When day broke over the plains of the Loita

we could gaze on a wonderful zoological scene
from the very doors of our tent. Stretching
away before us was a vast expanse, here and there
studded with small belts of trees and clusters
of wilderness scrub. And on this African prairie
wildebeeste, gazelles, hartebeeste and zebra
roamed at will in veritable armies and mingled
with the goats and sheep and cattle of the
Southern Masai. For this dreary, arid flatness
has with a fine show of charity been handed
over to those lithe, ochre-stained savages who
are the native overlords of East Africa. A
quarter of a century ago the Masai were the terrors
of Eastern Equatoria. Yet their subjugation has
been a practically bloodless contest. But they
are still the native patricians of East Africa.
Work they scorn, and their vast herds of cattle
render them magnificently independent. Here
as in North America, when the interests of those
savages who have owned the land for centuries
has clashed with the interests of the white man,
the native has had to give way before the alien.
The rich pasturages of the Rift valley and the
plateaux were the favourite grazing-grounds of
the Masai, but the white man has need of them,
and in our Imperial liberality we have said to
225
the Masai, 44 The luxuriance of the Loita plains
is yours. Go there and prosper.” That the
Masai have not found contentment in their new
domains is common knowledge in East Africa.
But the fiat has gone forth, and who are the
Masai that they should object to our schemes of
settlement ?
There was one old chief who used to tend his
flocks not far from our camp and who was a most
amiable old person. Elmi acted as the medium
of interpretation, and he told me of a great
black-maned lion that used to 44 Wuff, wuff ”
in the rocky hills beyond the water-hole in the
gray hours before the dawn. I can see the old
fellow now as I write, one thin, wiry leg resting
with the foot above the knee of the other, his
long seven-foot spear grasped firmly in hand, the
seared and wizened old face beaming with the joy
of imparting valuable knowledge. Around his
neck was a snuff-box cunningly constructed out
of a brass cartridge case. He was clad in a foul¬
smelling leathern jerkin with beaded edges that
dropped loosely over the legs akimbo. Quaint
old fellow ! He looked for all the world like a
marabout stork !
As for his lions, I saw no trace of them during
my sojourn in Sotik. Yet only a few weeks
before Rainey, the American millionaire, with
his pack of hounds, 44 chivied ” out and slew over
a score from the self-same kopjes that looked
down on our camp by the water-hole.
One evening Elmi and I tramped all over the
rocky hillocks into which deep bush-covered
ravines ran. Elmi, with keen relish in the re¬
membrance of more fortunate 44 safaris,” showed
me where a couple of lions had stood at bay,
where a great fellow with a fine grizzled mane had
A FINE EAST AFRICAN IMP ALA
[To facep. 226
BOHOR REED-BUCK, MAU ESCARPMENT

-o.i
charged in most desperate fashion, from where

no less than five of the beasts had bolted.
Below us a herd of impala dashed plainwards
with long, graceful bounds and vanished amongst
the scrub. A gorgeous panorama of the world
abandoned lay stretched out before us. North¬
wards we could look beyond the sluggish course
of the Guaso Nyiro to the knife edge of the Mau;
southwards, to where in the dim distance flat-
topped hills ran along the German frontier.
Westwards we could gaze on land that was but
a day’s march distant from Victoria Nyanza,
eastwards to the plains that hold the wonderful
Soda lake. The light was still good enough to
enable us to make out the straggling shapes of
great herds of game. Close in to the foot of the
hills one or two ostriches moved along grotesquely,
and beyond them the camp fires around the
water-hole burned and seemed to spell out in
twinkles of flame a message of comfort and good
cheer.
These rugged hills, although they held no
Kings of Beasts for me, added to my list of
trophies spoils that do not often come the way
of the hunter. One of these was a Chandler’s
reed-buck, which I espied one afternoon when
scaling the kopjes. These animals, even more
so than the klip-springer, are the chamois of
Africa, and it was with much joy that I heard
my bullet get home with a telling thud, for it
was the first of these graceful little antelopes
that I had ever shot. The other rarity was a
porcupine found one morning in a ravine while
I was searching for leopards. That was another
red-letter day in my hunting annals, for, in
addition to the porcupine, I secured two very
good Thomson’s gazelle heads and a fair harte-
beeste before returning to camp. That day, too,
I had a long and wearying chase after a topi—
the East African cousin of the tsessebe or
66 bastard hartebeeste ” of the Boers. I had
three years before, when hunting on the Mau
escarpment, added a pair of topi horns to my
collection. Otherwise I should have been sorely
disappointed, for although my first shot told
and the topi turned a complete somersault, I
failed to come within range of the animal again.
Time and time again after a long and wearying
snake-like crawl up to a little ant-heap, I would
just be congratulating myself on being at last
well-nigh able to take a long shot, when off would
gallop the tantalizing beast into the heat haze
that forever sheathes the Loita. Topi are indeed
speedy animals, and their capacity for carrying
an extraordinary amount of lead into safety is
as remarkable as is their ability to outdistance
the fastest shooting pony that ever looked through
a bridle.
At length, after having secured all the specimens
we desired and that were procurable on the dreary
expanse of the Loita, we set our faces to the
North again, bent on shooting the rare colobus
monkey in Kijabe mountain before returning
to Nairobi. The oxen after their rest at the
water-hole responded readily to the shouts of the
little Masai driver, and strained at their yokes
on the homeward path with something almost
akin to merriment.
In a couple of hours we had crossed the sluggish
Guaso Nyiro and had said good-bye to the lonely
young storekeeper who lived his solitary life
of commerce in this dry and fly-cursed land. At
eventide we had reached the Ongorra Narok,
and by the next noon the Maji Mowa had been
crossed. That same evening we halted at the
Sibi, where we found an American 64 safari ”
encamped under the guidance of Outram, a
professional white hunter.
Two days afterwards we had descended the
escarpment of the Mau and were trekking across
the Suswa plains. At midday I left the wagon
and brought down a fine Grant’s gazelle, and
then, as rain was falling, hastened on to where
camp had been pitched under the brow of Suswa.
A quarter of a mile away Messrs. Stern and
Webb’s 44 safari ” was encamped, and the porters
from each expedition were carrying water from
a little rill that ran amongst the Suswa foothills.
I was just commencing lunch when Jusef, the
Somali headman, rushed up to me breathless with
the information that one of the 44 Bwana Webb’s ”
boys, whilst searching for water up towards
the base of the mountain, and not more than half
a mile away, had seen a lion. Hastily seizing
a rifle and calling Chama, I bolted off in the
direction indicated by Jusef, and joined Stern and
Webb, who were tearing over the rocky ground
to where a solitary 44 pagazi ” was perched on a
little eminence. He was shouting and pointing
towards where the 44nek” of Suswa ran down
to meet the plain at the foot of the Kikuyu
escarpment. We raced up to him, and ascer¬
tained that down in the ravine below us he had
been filling up his water-bottles when he suddenly
became aware of the presence of a lion standing
some yards away from him. For a few moments
the boy and the King of Beasts stood facing one
another, and then with a few grunts the lion had
bounded away.
The native pointed to a small hillock on the
top of which he said he had last seen the beast.
These small hillocks which lay at the foot of
Suswa were separated from one another by deep
bush-clad ravines. In places trees and tangled
creepers met overhead, and we soon realized
that the lion with his usual wiliness had in all
probability slunk away down one of these semi¬
subterranean channels, and by now was in all
probability safely concealed and a mile or two
away. And so it proved. We beat these ravines.
Webb and a gun-bearer walked down them,
and Stern and I patrolled the sides, but Leo
had made good his escape, and after an hour
and a half of fruitless search we returned to our
disturbed lunches.
That afternoon I was busy making up loads
of trophies to be sent by porters into Nairobi.
The next morning the wagon started off on the
last lap of its homeward journey, and at evening
we were again below the towering form of Kijabe
mountain, and preparing to ascend it the next
day after that singularly beautiful animal the
colobus monkey. The ascent was no easy task.
Indeed, I have seldom undertaken harder work.
At first we had easy slopes to walk up. Then
steep banks where the soft earth crumbled under¬
foot had to be scaled. After an hour’s arduous
toil we halted rather more than half-way up the
mountain side. Our breath was coming in deep
halting gasps, and we sat down in the shadow
of the great primeval forest that robes Kijabe
mountain and peered around for signs of the
highly prized monkeys for which we had laboured
so hard. We had just commenced to ascend
again when the keen eyes of Elmi, ever on the
alert, descried away to our right a colobus.
Hastily we followed him, slipping down the
treacherous earth banks, now and then grasping
at tree trunks that grew in grotesque shapes like
octopi, or hauling ourselves up again by means
of branches. Here vegetation grew in a dense
and tangled riot, and peer as I might I could see
no trace of the beautiful black and white ape,
with hairs long and silky, and a snowy white
beard that gives him the appearance of a grotesque
Father Christmas.
Chama, the other gun-bearer, at length seized
me by the arm and pointed straight in front of him.
Still I could see nothing but leaves and twigs
and branches all tangled together. Chama con¬
tinued to point and gesticulate excitedly, but
it was quite useless. I could only see lianas
and creepers and giant trees, and here and there
a rift in the sea of vegetation through which
the blue tent of the equatorial sky was visible.
And so I stood, impotent and annoyed, until I
heard a faint rustle amongst the leaves and saw
something that looked almost like some weird
bird draped in black and white wool spring from
the leafy shelter of one tree to another. The
flight was so quick that my eye scarcely could
follow it, but this time the colobus took refuge
on a bough where the leaves were fewer and he
afforded a comparatively easy shot. Steadying
my rifle on Chama’s shoulder, for my breath still
was coming in quick gasps—I pulled the trigger.
In the stillness of that primordial forest the shot
rang out as though it were the blatant trump
of doom. It echoed and re-echoed across deep
ravines that only these arboreal monkeys could
cross, and then there was a momentary silence
and the sound of something falling far away
down below us. Chama and I descended the
side of the mountain again, and about one hun¬
dred feet below we found the colobus lying dead
on a bed of lichens. Although I had used a solid
bullet his beautiful, hairy cloak was badly torn,
and I decided that in future I should have to
employ a shot-gun. As the monkey lay there
in the dim light of the mountain woods I again
felt one of those pangs of pity and remorse that
sooner or later, I suppose, come to most people
who, as a French newspaper has so well put it,
say to one another : “ Isn’t it a lovely morning !
Let’s go and kill something ! ”
A few words more about the colobus before
I take you to the top of Kijabe mountain.
The colobus is one of the Guereza family, of
which about a dozen species are spread across
Equatorial Africa. The white-tailed variety is
the best known and most handsome. A robe
of long, pure white and silky hair falls upon either
side of his body, and contrasts with the coal-
black mantle of the head and face. To see
these extraordinarily beautiful little creatures
peering down on you from the top of some immense
cedar tree, their little faces peeping through the
highest forks, is to witness one of the most
quaintly picturesque sights of animal life in
Africa. When covered by the high forks of
the trees it is of course very difficult to hit these
monkeys, for the shot as likely as not merely
will spatter on boughs and solid trunks. Even
if your shots tell there is a big chance of the little
beast dying in his arboreal fortress, and the
coveted spoils not coming into the hands of the
hunters.
That was what we learned when at last we
halted breathless on the mountain top, and a few
minutes later found ourselves amongst a troop
of colobus. We had plunged through a great
floral sea. Creepers tripped us up, stinging
nettles breast high stung our arms and hands
and legs; now and then we sank down into a soft,
mossy pit and clambered out by the aid of branches
and monkey ropes. So dense was the canopy
that little light came through, but now and then
we caught a glimpse of the fleeting colobus,
or saw one of these simian squirrels peeping
through the hood of his mantle at the intruders
on his forest home.
By dint of much hard work and diligent prying
four more monkeys were shot that afternoon.
One fell on to my coat, and in his dying rage and
agony bit and clawed one side of it to threads.
The others fell down stone dead. We were weary,
stung and aching with the exertion of climbing.
Our eyes, too, were full of wood dust that had been
brought down by the shots, and so we elected to
descend to where our camp lay, far, far down
beneath. We still had our toll to take of the
colobi, however. I had made up my mind
to secure the full six allowed on a £50 licence,
for, oh, vanity of vanities ! I wished to present
them in the form of a muff or a stole in England.
By next mid-day, therefore, we had again reached
the crest of the mountain, and ere long were
amongst the gorgeous monkeys. But on this
occasion the colobi were more wily than on the
day before, and try as I might I could not get a
fair shot at one. And then there happened one
of the most extraordinary things that ever has
fallen within the range of my experience. In
the mountain forest we came across some
N’Derobo—the lowest type of mankind in East
Africa, people who have no habitations, who
live by hunting, and are, in fact, the modern
counterpart of our Berserker forefathers. For
the promise of a small reward they assisted us
to good purpose in our murderous designs on
the monkeys. One of these curious savages
clung to the trunk of a tree on the topmost
prongs of which a monkey was perched and well-
nigh hidden by boughs and leaves. The N’De¬
robo chattered, and the colobus chattered back.
It was a Ute-a-tete of the monkey folk, and I
watched, so intently interested that I well-nigh
forgot the loaded 12-bore in my hand. A few
seconds elapsed and the monkey man leapt
through stinging nettles and over tangled under¬
growth to another tree, and there recommenced
his prattlings. After him the monkey sped,
and as the furry form flew through the air I fired.
The colobus fell with an almost sickening thud,
and I followed the N’Derobo to where he had
recommenced his simian gibberish at the base
of another tree monster. Another monkey
chattered back, and I longed that Darwin might
have been there to witness this strange conversa¬
tion, so germane to Darwin’s great belief. But
oh ! the treachery of it all! The N’Derobo
was again speeding away and again a charge
of shot interrupted the following flight of the
colobus.
The sun was sinking over the purple brow of
Longonot as we emerged from the forest with all
the monkey skins that we wished for.
Below us Kijabe and the Kedong Valley, with
Mount Margaret and the sparsely bushed plains,
lay spread out like a giant map. To-morrow
the train would bear us again over the towering
wall of the Kikuyu escarpment to Nairobi, to
hotels and the madding crowd of those who live
with Nature as a neighbour and yet will know
her not.
I turned my face to the mountain paths that
coiled and twisted below us, and as the tin roof
of Kijabe station came into view out of the quick¬
ening gloom, I thought of the N’Derobo and
the monkeys, in their primeval mountain home,
and I pondered on how little all our Magi ever
can teach us. For we white people after all
are merely steeplejacks who have climbed to what
we regard as the highest pinnacle of existence.
Most of our steeples are worthless structures
surmounted by phantom weather-cocks, and
how little, oh, how little do we know of the real
world that lies below the towers of arrogance on
which we perch ourselves !
CHAPTER XV
UGANDA : THE DEVIL IN GOD’S GARDEN
On my first journey to East Africa I stayed in

Nairobi but a few days and then took train to
Molo. That view from the Kikuyu escarpment,
with the Great Rift Valley stretching out before
me to the far-away Mau, will be for ever impressed
on my memory.
Here, where the Ukamba and Naivasha
Provinces meet, all in this great cleft and in the
distant range of mountains away to the west
has an indistinct and blue appearance. But, as
the traveller speeds on through rich forests and
across the viaducts which bridge the beautiful
glades of the escarpments, there come out of
the haze mountains and lakes, peaceful farms,
and broad cattle ranches. After the purple
dome of Longonot, there appear the waters of
Lake Naivasha, basking in the afternoon sun,
land-locked by purple hills. Through this great
rift the Equator runs, but it is hard to abolish
ideas of the lochs of Scotland and the lakes of
Switzerland from the mind. But here are the true
inhabitants of Africa to remind one that the
blue waters are those of Naivasha, and not of
Loch Katrine or of Lucerne. Further to the
west lies the great ridge of the Mau escarpment,
where in 1908 I spent some happy weeks hunting
topi and Jackson’s hartebeeste.
In these escarpments there are to be found
236
UGANDA 287
numbers of N’Derobo. Old Sumatwa was one of
these. I can picture him now coming down from
the forest to the little camp where I was super¬
intending the cutting up of a Jackson’s harte-
beeste—an old man with long, thin, aged legs
striding down the hillside, carefully picking his
path and giving one the impression that he was
following a zigzag spoor. Sumatwa’s life had
been spent in hunting; no hoof-marks missed
his eye, no Serval cat bounded away into the
long grass but he saw every leap. His dominat¬
ing passion in life had been the following and
killing of game, and into every glance and move¬
ment he threw his calling. Game was to him the
alpha and omega of existence, and when fresh
meat was not to be obtained he would greedily
devour the most revolting offal. His overlords,
the Masai, said of him and his people, “ After
the lion comes the hyaena and jackal, then the
vulture, and then the N’Derobo.” He had no
hut, no lasting or even temporary abode. He
was a nomad who would tell you but little of
himself or his people, and who knew nothing of
his history and cared a great deal less.
The day will come when the glorious highlands
of western British East Africa will be tenanted
by whites from the Uasin Gishu plateau to the
northern confines of German East Africa, and,
like the wild animals of the forests and plains
of that strangely fascinating land, the N’Derobo
will die before the advance of civilization.
As the shrouds of romance and abysmal ignor¬
ance are raised off the face of Africa, her own
innate mysteries will be washed away as the
clouds and mists are sometimes lifted off the
shy face of Mount Kenia. And so the descendants
of old Sumatwa will disappear into the realms
of long ago. A strange people, with an unknown

history, their habitation is in those wild moun¬
tains which tower above the region of the Great
Lakes where the clouds of heaven mingle with
the forests of earth. I have watched those clouds
waft away over the bamboo-clad slopes of Mount
Londiani and the warm face of the sun shine
through their fast-disappearing mists, and men¬
tally I have drawn a parallel between the
dispersing vapours and the inevitable extinction
of the barbaric natives who inhabit these fast¬
nesses. The high altar of civilization demands
many sacrifices, and the day is not far distant
when the curious children of Sumatwa, with
their skin head-dresses, their crudely fashioned
garments of hide, and their semi-animal habits,
will, like the better-known Maoris and Sioux,
be offered up to satisfy the ambitions of an age of
advance. Londiani will look down on the world
as of yore, the purple dome of Longonot will
still raise its head over that great rift in the
earth’s surface which extends from the Dead
Sea to the cleft of Lake Nyasa, but they alone
will miss those whom they had known for ages
as the inhabitants by law of right of the lovely
land lying below them.
Continuing my journey across East Africa,
I reached one morning the curious little port of
Kisumu or Port Florence on Lake Victoria
Nyanza. Recent surveys have indicated that
Victoria Nyanza is the largest lake in the world.
At any rate, only Superior can dispute its claim,
and no other body of inland water possesses
such a haunting charm as this does. In the
early morning the face of the waters is as placid
as a mill-pond. A miniature archipelago of
islets, all robed in the gorgeous raiment of the
KAVIRONDO WOMEN ON THE MAU ESCARPMENT
[To face p. 238

RIVER NILE, A MILE FROM ITS SOURCE,
NEAR JINJA, UGANDA

UGANDA 239
Equator, rises above the peaceful lake. “ This

indeed, is Fairyland,” you murmur. A few
hours elapse and a cool breath of wind blows
across the inland sea. Dark clouds take the
place of the brilliant azure of the sky. A brief
half-hour speeds by, and the rain comes down as
though the reservoirs of the heavens had burst
their walls. Angry wavelets instead of tranquil
pond, turmoil where peace reigned supreme,
tempestial torrents instead of restful blue.
“ This, indeed, is tropical rage,” you remark,
amazed at the rapidity of the change.
On the eastern shores, where Kisumu nestles
below the towering cliffs of the Nandi escarpment,
the Kavirondo roam naked and unashamed.
They are the most moral tribe of the Victoria
Nyanza region. On the northern side, where
Great Britain administers Uganda at Entebbe,
and the old native kingdom has its capital at
Kampala, the Baganda, white-robed and enlight¬
ened, live in an atmosphere of culture. They are
the Japanese of Africa. Southwards Germany
has peopled the lake shores with true sons of
the Fatherland. In white ducks and tall helmets
they mingle with Baziba barbarians, and send
the produce of their farms and plantations
across the lake to the terminus of the Uganda
Railway.
On the great water modern steamships with
clean-clad naval officers cut across the bows of
native craft, lateen-sailed and crowded. A
twentieth-century railway runs down to the
water on the eastern side, and on the west you
may reach the slopes of the Mountains of the
Moon by ricksha and porters. This is, indeed,
a land of contrasts, and perhaps the greatest con¬
trast of all is the old, old Nile flowing northwards
16
to the land of the Pharaohs from this heart of
commercialized Africa. The mother river of
North Africa tumbles over the Ripon Falls and
wends its way to the Mediterranean as calmly
independent as it did when the Mamelukes ruled
Egypt, as little perturbed at the advent of the
steam-engine and the Powers of Europe as is the
sun at the flight of an aeroplane.
There are few more productive themes of
fancy than to ponder on the life-story of a great
river, to conjure up visions of the nations it
has nurtured, the fleets of conquest it has floated,
the years of famine and plenty that its caprices
have borne. And especially is this true of the
Nile.
I remember sitting one evening on a little
mound overlooking the first flow of Nile water
in Usoga. The roar of the torrent over the lip
of Nyanza came from behind me as the breaking
of the surf on the pebbled beach, and the gentle
rhythm of the flowing waters over a myriad of
miniature cascades, through a multitude of
little swirling whirlpools, northwards ever north¬
wards, sounded faint and indistinct like the bells
on cattle sound when church chimes are pealing
their loudest on a quiet English Sunday evening.
Across the Ripon Falls spurwinged geese hastened
their sundown flight. The trees on either side
of the river took on the sombre gown of eve,
and the rocks which break the flow of the waters,
and which in the light of midday had seemed
gaunt and ugly, grew soft and picturesque as
night fell over hill-wreathed sea, laughing river
and tropic shore. A slender thread of silver
twisted in and out of the lovely land : the Nile
at the first milestone on its troubled flight to the
blue of the Mediterranean.
UGANDA 241
Darkness came like a cloud on the scene, but
still the turmoil of the waters thundered from
the falls, and still that wondrous picture of the
birth of the world’s most famous river was clear
before me. Flashes of lightning now and then
brightened the Northern sky, and seemed to
call to the river to fly from the heathen darkness
of Nyanza to the cradle of the world’s learning.
They talk of harnessing the Ripon Falls in these
days of commercial vandalism. Nile water as
it leaps from the womb of Victoria Nyanza is
to drive turbines ! What sacrilege ! What an
infamous disregard for one of the most monu¬
mental works of Nature!
There are many other scenes of the Victoria
Nyanza region which are indelibly impressed
on my memory. But undoubtedly the most
beautiful of all is the view from the hill which
overlooks Entebbe. There below you nestles
the toy capital, an outpost of Empire in Lotus
Land. Bungalows lie buried in a riot of glorious
colour, wreathed in a maze of heliotrope and crim¬
son, for the flower-beds of Entebbe are tended
by the head gardener of God, and the emerald
hue of the verdant background could only have
been painted by the Creator Himself. Cast
your eyes a little farther, and the deep blue lagoon¬
like arms of the lake channel into the luscious
landscape. Entebbe is indeed an emerald gem
set in a sapphire sea, a vision of loveliness which
might make Killarney envious.
At night the Soudanese sentries pace the land¬
ing-stage, and their hoarse challenges mingle
with the gentle lapping of the lake. A myriad
fireflies flit across the warm sweet air and light
the scene with fairy lanterns. It all seems so
lovely, but there is the poison of the nightshade in
the atmosphere. Eleven years ago a great cloud
of death fell on Uganda. It had swept across
the Congo forests, and it set a seal of doom on a
thousand islets and habitations in this modern
Garden of Eden. Sleeping sickness has devas¬
tated much of the Victoria Nyanza region.
Mengo, Kampala, Jinja, Entebbe, Munyonyo
and Lozeras have all come under its awful ban.
In a few brief years the Sese islands have been
well-nigh depopulated, and the shores of the
inland sea have cried to Heaven for deliverance.
It seems as though the plagues of the Pharaohs
have hastened down the Nile to stay the advance
of modern days, and well they have succeeded.
The heat of the Equator and the pestilence of the
sleep of death have held this Tropical Protectorate
safe from the prying eyes of the tourist season.
It has been well written—
“ All things in some divine

And wish’d for way, conspire as
Nature knows,
To some great good.”
Perhaps in the case of Uganda, where the native

asks and answers in the super-polite phrases of
Tokio, the deadly palpalis fly conspires to some
great good, for this jewel of the interior would
lose much of its bounteous brilliance were the
hands of all men to weigh its worth. And so
it nestles in its own unsullied wreath of beauty,
and hides its charms beneath a holocaust.
CHAPTER XVI
EGYPT : TO THE CELESTIAL CITY
It had for long been my desire to see some¬

thing of the land of the Pharaohs, and at last
in 1911 my wish was gratified and I landed at
Suez.
Egypt! The very word is a charm. It con¬
jures up visions of ensaffroned sunsets, of stately
palms bowing to the desert wind, of living
cities gorgeous in their Oriental splendour, of
buried cities musty with the myrrh of millenniums.
Wondrous, wondrous country ! How many have
followed your piping even as the children of
Hamelin followed the Piper and were stolen
away ? How few who have seen your true beauty
have not hankered to know more, to drink to
the full of the nectar of the Pharaohs ? Qui
a bu de Veau du Nil vent en reboire.
It is when we come on a new land, where all
is strange and beautiful, that something seems
to call to us from childhood’s days, something
that tells us to forget trouble and toil, something
that seems to turn our worries into rocking-
horses, and make us boys and girls again. There
is no other on the face of earth that can charm
away the cobwebs of life as can Egypt. She
is the nursery-land of all the nations. Five
thousand years before the advent of Christ,
when all else was wild and barbaric and uncul¬
tured, Egypt had knowledge of arts so wondrous
243
that even the great brains of to-day can only
ponder on them. Egypt taught the world when
the nations were young. She was a wise governess
and she rocked dynasties in her cradle. She
is a nursery-land to-day, when the world has
grown old and joyless. She can take us by the
hand as though the nations were again little
children. She can draw smiles from those who
have lost their moods of mirth, she can charm
the most blase with her gorgeous toys.
Where the soft warm air blows from off the
bosom of the slumbering desert, where the lateen
sails dip to the silvery Nile, where colours play
at riot and skies are sapphire blue, this is the
garden wherein the old may feel young again,
where the young may feel younger, and the dying
spirit may regain all that is worth living for.
For there is that in Egypt to do all this. There
is the panacea of Paracelsus which is called
Azoth—the joyous tincture of life.
The Desert Express left Suez with its flat-topped
houses and the blue gulf of the sea behind, and
tore across the sands. Egypt is a land of deep
rich colours; the glaucous green of the date-
palm, the silvery sheen of the Nile, the golden
red of the desert. Shades and shadows, glare,
and soft subdued light, conflict with each other,
but there is always that background of golden
red, the colour of the desert, the living blush of
dead Pharaohs. It is the tint that ever mirrors
on the Nile, intensifies the glory of the moonlight,
or regilds the golden glamour of the dying sun.
Those mountain ranges which look down on
Suez from the west give the visitor to Egypt
from the south his first impression of this glorious
all-pervading undertone, and when they are lost
to sight there is the vastness of the plain of sands,
EGYPT 245
with here and there a camel caravan to give added

romance to the scene.
Many centuries ago Herodotus wrote of Egypt
as “ the gift of the Nile.” That is as true of
Egypt to-day as it was when Rome was master
of the world. Over six thousand years ago
the Egyptians lived by the mercy of that river
which rises in the distant heart of Equatoria,
and spreads each twelve months a layer of alluvial
sediment, bears down gravel from the Abyssinian
mountains, and lays a kindly covering of rich
earth over barren rock and desert sand. In
Coptic, Egypt was called “ Kemi,” which means
“ black-land,” and any one who journeys to-day
from Suez to the capital may see how true it
is that Egypt is still, and ever will be, but the
offering to a needful humanity of a mighty
Providence and a noble river.
It is after the desert battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir,
with its sand-dunes and trenches, has been crossed,
that the wondrous fertility of Lower Egypt
manifests itself in countless acres of brilliant
green lucerne, of clover, and beans and lentils.
Egypt, too, was the home of the papyrus, which
in days gone by supplied costly writing-paper
for the world, but in these times the cotton-plant
and the sugar-cane have superseded it. This
is one of the most wonderfully irrigated tracts
of country in the whole world, this gift land of
the paternal river. Millions of little canals,
aqueducts and waterways carry the precious
fluid to the fruitful acres cultivated by the fella¬
heen. Here and there picturesque old water¬
wheels give an added touch of Egypt the old,
the mysterious, the entrancing, to the landscape.
Now and then one catches glimpses of felucca
sails.
The town of Zagazig, on a branch of the sweet-
water canal which connects Ismailia with the
Nile, is passed, and ere long Cairo is in sight, the
Citadel and Heliopolis claim your eyes, the
Mamelukes, Rameses, Pharaohs and Meneptah
take form out of the soft glowing light.
The mellow magnificence of the full moon rising

in the evening sky threw a flood of soft light over
the city that lay below me, and bathed the
mosques, the domes, the minarets, the bazaars,
the temples of the mighty and the hovels of
the humble in a sheen of silken splendour. I
stood on the terrace of the great mosque of
Mohamed Ali at the Citadel, and gazed fascinated
at the wonder-city of Cairo, the northern sentinel
of Africa, where the East and the West meet
and a tongue of barbaric flame leaps up from the
South to kindle fresh fires of fantasy. Cairo,
city of celestial charms ! city of a thousand
minarets and a million worshippers, city steeped
in Eastern sin and Western vice! city where the
camel collides with the taxi-cab, and the gorgeous
modernity of the Semiramis Hotel looks out on
the patriarchal beauty of the old, old Nile and
the eternal riddle of the questioning Sphinx !
There is an indefinable something about Cairo
which grips the senses as in a vice and makes
imagination throb and quiver. The spirits of
all the Pharaohs and all the Mamelukes for ever
brood over the modern Heliopolis, and whether
it be an ancient fellah pressing you to buy a
scarab or a dragoman in resplendent raiment
escorting you to Shepheard’s—one of the most
famous of all hostels—there is an undertone of
fairy talk in every pleading, a substratum of
mm.
| To face p. 24ti
EGYPT 247
antiquity and wonder in every inch of every

pathway.
From my perch at the Citadel I could just
distinguish the silver thread of the Nile twisting
like a spangled serpent. To my right the great
mass of the alabaster mosque towered moon-
wards. The muezzins had ceased their callings
to the Faithful, and the hush of Allah had fallen
over the city below.
I feel sorry for the man whose soul is so bereft
of imagination that he could have looked on Cairo
that evening and not seen phantoms of the past
dancing round the city. I feel more sorry still
for the mind so barren of real joy that could have
looked up into the soft dome of the evening sky
and not felt thrilled with the sheer beauty of the
thing; sky and stately minaret, evening glory
and snow-white mosque. These are things which
make one realize how leaden are our Western
ways, how sullen, and gray and forbidding are
our lives and our monuments. Our Western
world has envied Egypt her beauty and her
slumbers, and has tried to steal them, and
Egypt has borne the invasion with a spirit of
sublime tolerance.
Modern Cairo is the fashionable centre of the
East. The wealthy of three continents winter
there and bask in the Egyptian sunshine, and
feast and drink and make merry. But for all
the modem splendour of the hotels, for all the
demi-mondaines who have migrated along the
sun-path from every city in Europe, Cairo retains
all her old-day mysteries, all her archaic glory.
The motor-car has not defaced her antiquity,
the cradle of the world’s learning has not lost
a single shaft of light from her hoary halo
because a few high-living mortals are mocking

her age.
If you would see that spirit of great age
revealed in all the mystery of time and stone,
go out to the mystic Sphinx and ponder on the
years. That inscrutable watcher on the desert
sands was old when the world was young, and
had grown worn and rugged with the sands of
time when the Wise Men came to Bethlehem and
angels in the sky proclaimed the Nativity.
Tradition has it that the Infant Christ was laid
between the feet of the effigy by Mary and Joseph
when the holy Family fled to Egypt to escape
the wrath of Herod. Those mighty feet, which
might have guarded the King of Christendom,
have long since been hidden by the sands.
More than half the Sphinx is to-day buried beneath
the rising floor of the desert. But still the extra¬
ordinary face stares out as though it could laugh
at time and eternity and the infinite, though the
hour-glass of centuries has covered some of its
fantastic grandeur.
One feels as one gazes on the Sphinx and on
the great Pyramids of stone—fitting companions
for the colossal image—that these things are
older than creation, that the sardonic face must
have been there to gaze on the first grains of the
desert sand; that the first bird that flew into
the Garden of the World must have seen with
wonder the mighty top of the Pyramid of Cheops
and longed to fly round the pinnacle.
It is almost impossible to believe that men and
women exist who cannot ponder on and marvel
at these grim giants of a monumental epoch,
and yet there are such; people who trip gaily
each year to violate the vigil of the Sphinx, who,
I verily believe, feel disappointed that the figure
EGYPT 249
is not robed in a hobble skirt, people who mock

the Pyramids and would see a beer-hall perched
on the topmost summit.
But Egypt can laugh at all the vandalism of
all the vandal world. You place tramcars in
the streets of Cairo, but you cannot drive the
camel and the kohl-tinted peasant from her.
You may deck the porches of her luxurious hotels
with the modern finery of Paris, but only the
eyes that peer at you over the yashmaks will
be always in your mind.
Egypt is a land for the dreamer, for the lover
of a great slumbering silence, for the worshipper
of the sun. Thoth travelled in the Boat of the
Sun, and so will you when you visit the land of
the date-palm and the slumbering Nile. If
your life has been prosaic, Egypt will set it
tingling with the rhythm of new conceptions. If
each one of your years has writhed and quivered,
Egypt will regild your joyous dreams, soften
your nightmares, make you forget your carking
cares.
You who have ghosts to lay to rest, bury them
in the golden depths of the Libyan sands. You
who would seek new paths in the careworn walk
of life, seek them where the Pharaohs ruled,
where the sunsets glow, and life has lustre and
love and light. Lend yourself to Egypt for a
while, and let her mesmerize you with her subtle
charms. For this is a land that was born like
a lovely woman, to delight and entrance.
CHAPTER XVII
EGYPT (CONTINUED) : DREAMS OF THE DESERT
The Egyptian State Railways Express whirled

out of Cairo station—Tsmailia bound. Date-
palms and peasant villages were wrapped in
gloom, and I lay back in the corner of my
comfortable coach and slumbered. It had been
a day of gorgeous brilliance, and the memories
of the giant, sombre Pyramids, of the eternal
watcher on the desert sands, of the lazy, languid
Nile, and the wonder city bathed in moonlight
below the alabaster mosque, lulled me into
delicious dreamland. Again the great stone
pile of Cheops loomed up before me, and the
silence of the ceaseless sands seized earth and
sky in a great irresistible embrace of stillness;
such a stillness as must follow the last trump of
doom, when all the living things of earth have
been called to the throne of judgment.
And then it seemed that the face of the great
Pyramid was cleft in two, and the figure of a
man emerged from the tomb of rent rocks.
He was tall and handsome, and scorn played on
his sharp features.
“ Who are you? 55 he asked, and I knew not
what to answer.
He turned his withering gaze from me for a
moment and looked where the strange old Sphinx
kept everlasting vigil. And then he raised his
eyes towards the Pyramids of Sakkara and the
site of Memphis,
250
THE GREAT PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
EGYPT 251
Osiris, judge of the dead, and Isis and Aelurus
were with him. In death his gods had not
deserted him.
He turned and faced me again, and the mystery
of the whole scene set me a-trembling.
“ I am Meneptah,” he said; and his voice
seemed to thunder across the desert as though
it would echo and re-echo to the edge of the
world.
“ I was the ruler of all this land,” he con¬
tinued ; “ I caused these monuments to be built,”
and he waved his hands around till he had denoted
each of the great Pyramids—Cheops and Chephren
and the seven smaller colossal structures of
Gizeh, built over the sepulchral chamber of
those who reigned in Egypt more than fifty
centuries ago.
He looked proudly at the great towering piles
of stone, and for a while he seemed forgetful
of my poor presence. His gods glared at me
with true godly anger.
“ What think you of my land? ” he queried
at last. Aghast at the wonder of his resurrection,
I murmured that it was beautiful and fair and
vastly interesting.
“ Beautiful and fair and vastly interesting,”
he repeated after me, and a sad smile crossed
the corners of his proud mouth. “ And think
you that you moderns have made it more
beautiful or more fair or more interesting?”
he asked, and a subterranean fire seemed to
burn his throat and flare and flicker in his dark,
searching eyes.
“ Have you increased the majesty of my tombs
or drawn more solemnity from the silent watcher,
because you have built a hotel to disturb
our desert sleep? Have you not defiled our
sepulchres, transported our inscriptions, our very
gods, to heathen lands across the seas, robbed us
even of our noble dead ? 55
He paused for a moment, and the aged dignity
of his wrath left me without answer. I could
only gaze in fascinated fear at the son of Rameses.
He that proud Pharaoh who was the essential
factor for evil in the Book of Exodus.
He raised a finger to the great Pyramid.
“ Have you anything so great, so vast, so colossal
in your modern world as that? ” he asked; and
there was danger lurking in the tone of his
interrogation.
I thought for a moment of St. Paul’s, but the
Colossus of Cheops is higher than the House of
God that Wren built. So I feebly gave expres¬
sion to one of the enigmas of the centuries :
“ How did you build them ? ”
“ By the shoulders and hands of slaves,” he
answered, pardoning the sorriness of my reply.
“ We have no slaves in the world to-day,”
I ventured.
“No? ” the traveller from the age of world-
dawn remarked; and there was a stinging scorn
in the softnesjs of that “ No.” I gained a little
courage.
“ Slavery,” I said, “ is a stain of sin on the
raiment of our modern righteousness, and we
have washed it out. There are no more slaves.”
“You are a slave,” said Meneptah, and there
was a world of disdain for the arrogance of my
modern pride in his voice. “You are all
slaves. Why do you work? Because you are
all serfs, because circumstance and the cruel
world are your masters, and they say to you, work
or you shall not eat bread, labour or you shall
not rest, toil or you must die* I have rested in
EGYPT 258
my sarcophagus through all the ages. I have
seen Emperors rise and Dynasties fall. I have
seen that subtle, irresistible weed of modernity
growing in my gardens, and I have been power¬
less to pluck it. It has choked the lovely
blooms of idleness, the buds of joy have been
withered; and I see strange flowers growing in
their stead, the deadly nightshades of trouble
and toil and tribulation have prospered with
the weed, and the vermiliary glare of the poppy
of insanity becomes more all-pervading every
day. They are all growing in your garden,95 he
continued; and the earnestness of his clarion
voice made me throb with that strange sense of
discomfort which comes to one when his ears
must listen to what he knows is the reality of
a pitiable truth.
“ Look," he continued, ce and I will show you
that the slavery of your great, teeming, civilized
cities is more degrading, more tedious, more
wearying, than ever were the labours of those
who raised up my treasure cities of Pithom and
Rameses."
Thereupon he raised his hand, and I saw old
Cairo and Memphis, and the countless millions
who toiled and made bricks of clay and straw.
They laboured under the smile of the god Thoth.
Their task-masters were often cruel and flogged
them with long whips. Yet their words seemed
smiles and sunshine; the gift of the Nile was full
of plenty, and the universe seemed to sing for
the very joy of youth.
The scene changed for a moment, and I saw
another vast city and another great river,
scurrying past crowded wharves and soot-stained
warehouses. It was night, and a cold rain fell—
on sloppy pavements, in troubled pools of mud,
and splashed where the flicker of the street-
lamps threw a mournful shred of light.
I saw the serfs of modernity, some toiling in
great, gaunt prisons, which for want of better
name were called offices. I saw men and women
and children, ragged and dirty and hungry,
lying cold on doorsteps, stretched in unutterable
squalor and misery by the side of that maternal
river. I saw rich men tire of their riches and
scatter their brains on costly carpets. I saw
lovely women sickened by the empty mockery
of their existence poison themselves and lie
stark and cold, with agony written on their
demented faces.
I heard children speak of the unutterable sins
as though they were boxes of wooden bricks.
I heard the boom of battle and the Babel of all
nations. I saw chaos and the world in its dotage.
“ Well ? ” said Meneptah, and there was that
in his voice which made me wonder whether he
had more of sorrow than of contempt for me
and mine.
“What think you? Do you worship false
gods, or did I? Hathor or Mammon? Aphro-
ditopolis or your centres of advancement ? 55
I knew not what to say, and the figure who
had come down from the stone-girt heart of his
tomb to teach me wisdom expected no reply.
“ I lived when the world was young and the
fires of youth tingled in every vein,” he said.
“You have your being in the age of care and
circumstance. The blood of the earth has run
cold, the feet of men are faltering in darkness,
and in your folly you call it light. You sorrow
for what you call the barbarism of my dynasty.
I pity you the sombre cruelty of what you term
civilization.
[To face p. 254
THE SILENT WATCHER

i|
EGYPT 2 55
44 Oh, joyous barbarism! Give me back

the sunshine of my monarchy ! ” and his gods
cried with him in chorus, 46 Give us back our
barbarism ! ”
Again I saw a rent in the Great Pyramid. A
fire burned brightly within, and the proud
philosopher of all the ages clasped his hands
before him and walked into the flames. The
massive blocks of stone leaped towards one
another and the vision of Meneptah was no more.
I looked towards the sad, worn, sardonic face
of the Sphinx. Still the silent watcher peered
through eternity as though those eyes of stone
would foresee the day of judgment. Just for
a moment I saw a smile steal over the inscrutable
countenance—such a smile as a wise man might
give a child who has talked to him of philosophy’s
alphabet; and then the smile was gone, and the
moon looked down and seemed in some strange
way to hold communion with the brooding
Sphinx and the illimitable sands.
We raced along the side of that gigantic cut

through the earth which is known as the Suez
Canal, the rift in the sandy isthmus from the
Red Sea to the Delta, first excavated by the
second Rameses, re-opened by Darius the Persian,
and again by the Moslem conquerors. Every
schoolboy has read of de Lesseps, whose master¬
mind consummated the project conceived so
very long ago, and made it a magnificent success
for modern shipping. His statue guards the
northern entrance to the canal, seems to brood
over the enormity of the commerce that his
fertile brain developed, and proclaims to all who
pass this road that Port Said was his creation.
The town is a reclamation from the desolate land
17
that lies between Lake Menzaleh and the
Mediterranean, and lives on the trade of the canal.
It was towards this cosmopolis that the
midnight express tore along. Great liners with
blazing head-lights all aglow with electric brilli¬
ance were passed, and we were soon at the north¬
ern terminus of the canal; we had reached what
is generally termed the wickedest town of the
world.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and we
drank coffee and smoked glorious cigarettes out¬
side a cafe, what time a Turkish acrobat turned
nimble somersaults. Port Said never sleeps.
It is a half-way house to the Orient, a quaint
seaport made by the genius of one man, and he has
no reason to be proud of his creation. The
East and the West and Paganism all come
together at Port Said. The sins of the world
find expression in this shameless seaport, the
iniquities of earth assemble here to revel.
Commerce and vice are curiously intertwined.
Here vessels may coal and halt awhile ere they
continue their voyages to the lands of the rising
sun. It is an ocean rest-house. Here are agencies
of all the great steamship companies, coal
companies, representatives of the merchant
princes of the East, and the sumptuous dome-
capped offices of the Suez Canal Company. Port
Said is on the highway of the seas, and all ocean
passengers to and from India, China, Japan,
East Africa and Australia, must pass her gates.
Sin has a half-way house here as well as
Commerce. This is a forwarding station in the
traffic of the white slaves, a place that drains
Europe of its immoral surplus, a distributing
centre for the houses of shame that lie east of
Suez. The fairest, least-soiled goods in this
EGYPT 257
loathsome trade are all in transit. They are
not displayed in the shop-windows of the foul¬
smelling streets and dark alleyways of Satan,
the landlord of all this seaport.
For a time they are stored away “ in bond ”
as well as in bondage. Their days come and
they sail away. They sink into the slough of
the Orient, and some come back in the fulness
of the years. They are no longer fair to look on,
unless the shop-window of life is gilded and
curtained and made to throw some of its own
brilliance on the painted goods behind the gaudy
glass. It is then that their sorry souls are put
up for auction in this seaport of shame.
Many of these wrecks of womanhood, these
misled wretches who have uprooted the choicest
flower that God planted in His garden, have
brought back all the suffering and sin of the East
with them. They are not women—they are
harpies, vultures with women’s breasts and
women’s faces. They have sold their lives for
gold, and the gold melted away as rapidly as
did their good looks. Milton must have had
such in mind when he penned those lines in
Paradise Lost—
44 Woman to the waist and fair,

But ending foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast; a serpent armed
With mortal sting.”
A woman’s face is not always her fortune, as

the nursery rhyme has it of the dairymaid. It
is as often her yoke of misery. Many a broken
soul has reviled the good God who gave her
comeliness and beauty. Port Said is full of
what were once women whose greatest curse was
the possession of a pretty face. These are the
trade goods that entered many an Eastern port
“ duty free.” Their duty to womenkind they
knew not, their duty to their employers termin¬
ated only when the cup of degradation had been
drained to the last shameful dregs.
There are little side streets in Port Said where
the red lights of infamy burn all night, wherein
a man may well get his throat cut without the
asking for it. There are vile photographers who
live in vile back passages. There are black¬
faced guides who for a few piastres will lead you
to houses of dance and song, to passages that
would have shamed Sodom and Gomorrah.
It is hard to realize that the same moon that
throws a soft sheen of splendour over the pure
grace of the date-palm looks down on all this
sullying sin. It is difficult to believe that the
same sun that is throwing halos of light over the
desert warns the demons of the night that their
riotousness must cease. It is a strange old world,
and it has always seemed to me that the most
inexplicable of all its mysteries is typified in the
growth of a buttercup and a stinging-nettle
together. And yet they do. The same rain
that refreshes the flower-beds of a palace may
flood a floral slum. Sin and sanctity may
breathe the same air and both may live.
Were you a Martian without knowledge of the
great riddles, the immense illogicals of this
world, you would never believe that Port Said
could exist in a land nursed and tended by the
noble Nile.
CHAPTER XVIII
FINIS
Nine years of my life had been spent in Africa

when at last I saw the northern coast of Morocco
fade away into the blue of the horizon. Each
of those years had drawn me closer to this vast
continent. Africa with her mystery, her free¬
dom, her untrammelled spaces, and her barbarism
had become my mistress, and I turned my face
to the North and the coast of Spain with a
regret softened by the knowledge that in a short
space of time I should set foot again on her
savage soil. The bonds had but been released
for a few weeks. Those shackles so subtly
forged are not fetters that easily are cast aside
for all time. I, for one, will ever return a willing
slave to worship at the shrine of the exquisite
goddess of Paganism who rules the Last
Continent.
But two short months went by and I turned
my back on Gibraltar and held out my hands
in a token of submission to those northern
shores that creep down from the Atlas Range
to bathe in the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean,
and but a few weeks later the snow pinnacles
of Kenia were above me and the glory of the
morning made me sing for very joy that I was
again in serfdom.
For what did I return ? Perhaps the spirit of
this book may answer. If this dedication to a
259
land that holds men enraptured through the
cheerless dawn of a fever bed in the wilderness,
and beckons them away from all that culture
and enlightenment proclaim as the joy of living,
be dumb, then must I shake my head in the
knowledge that no words of mine can ever frame
a reply. Africa, where the women have no
beauty, the birds no song, the flowers no scent,
and the rivers no water. How often have I
listened to that elaborate condemnation ! How
true at first I thought it all was ! But with the
flight of years there has come to me an apprecia¬
tion of the beauty of the ill-featured women,
I can hear music in the cry of the Lourie, even
the thorny aloe contains a perfume, and I think
a dried-up stream-bed can float for me more
charming fancies than the soot-stained waters
of the Thames.
Thus have I learned my Africa.
■ V
G.WBacan & Co., lita., 127 Strand, London.
INDEX
A Barreto, Francisco, Portuguese

navigator, 60, 146
Abazis, sect of, in Zanzibar, 156 Batuta, Ibne, Arabian historian,
Abyssinian traders, 199 on Zanzibar, 153
Achewa tribe in Nyasaland, 129 Baziba tribe, 239
Achipata tribe in Nyasaland, B.C.A. Co. on Shire and Zambesi
128, 129 Rivers, 134, 140
Aelurus, 251 Beira, railway to Nyasaland, 135;
Africa : call of, 14, 15, 16, 142, gateway of Rhodesia, 146
185, 205, 259; East Coast of, Blanket!, Commodore, reaches
history, 145; changed condi¬ Zanzibar, 154
tions, 168; fascination of, at Blantyre, commercial capital of
daybreak, 31 Nyasaland, 133
African Lakes Corporation, at Boran traders met, 200
Fort Jameson, 71; in Nyasa¬ “ Bo’sun(M’Toko native), 47,
land, 132; boats on the Zam¬ 49
besi, 140 Broken Hill, first journey to, 21;
Ali Bin Hamud, late Sultan of second journey, 22
Zanzibar, 158 Bronson, E. B., on Adolf
Angoni, conquest of, 127 Woermann, 161
Angoniland, 130, 131 B.S.A. Co.’s posts. See M’Rewas
Archer’s Post, 192 and M?Tokos.
Askaris, 75, 170; on Guaso Bua River, Nyasaland, 127
Nyiro River, 192 Bububu, Zanzibar, 159
Atlas Range, 259 Buffalo hunting in N.-W. Rhodesia,
Awemba, at Fort Jameson, 71; 27; charge of, 28; near Chi-
cruelty of, 104; and Wa-Unga, romo, 136; near Embu, 178;
118; and mutilation, 125 along Guaso Nyiro, 192
Awisa, at Fort Jameson, 71; a Buffalo bean, 66
typical village of, 95; in the Burru, Somali servant, 213
Luang wa, 104
Azoth, tincture of life, 244 C
Cabara, Somali gun-bearer, 194,
B 217
Baboons, eaten by natives, 50 Cairo, arrival at, 246; citadel of,
Babu, met on the Tete road, 53 246, 247; impressions of, 246
Baganda (people of Uganda), 239 et 'passim
Baila, tribe, 94 Cannibals, near Chifumbaze, 68
Bangweolo Lake, 117 Cape Town, arrival at, 13
Banyans, on the Ruenya, 54 Carden, Colonel, at Broken Hill,
Barotse Police, at Broken Hill, 21 21
262 INDEX
Cathedral, at Blantyre, 133; at with, 37; difficulties with, at
Mombasa, 170; at Zanzibar, Chofigas, 49
156 Donyo Sabuk Mountain, 177
Chafiga’s village, 49 Dutch Reformed Church, 121
Chama, Somali gun-bearer, 219,
231 E
Chambezi River, 115
Chambruga’s, on Ruenya River, East African Protectorate, ports
of, 168; fauna and game re¬
59
serves, 176; fascination of, 205
Chameleon, native stories con¬
Edwards, Colonel (late), 131
cerning, 88
Cheops, Pyramid of, 251 Egypt, impressions of, 243 et seq. ;
fertility of, 245
Chephren, Pyramid of, 251, 252
Chifumbaze, 68 Elephant, life story of, 101;
Chila, language of Baila, 94 author shoots two bulls, 103;
Chinde, unsatisfactory port, 135; near Tetie, 130; near Meru, 183
Elmi, Somali gun-bearer: and
reached, 140; impressions of,
rhino, 187, 189; and giraffe,
141 et passim
190; and buffalo, 192; and
Chinicoatali Mountains, 100, 109,
lions, 194, 201; and oryx, 196;
113
and leopard, 196, 202. Also
Chipane’s village, 53
Chiritzi River, koodoo at, 66 217, 221, 226
Chiromo, Nyasaland, 134, 136 El-moran (warriors), 183
Embu, Government station in
Chishawasha, mission station, 38
East Africa, 177, 178
Chiuta, Portuguese fort, 64
Entebbe, Uganda, impressions
Cingalese, in Zanzibar, 155
of, 241
Colobus monkey, characteristics
of, 232; hunting of, 233; and F
N’Derobo, 233 Fort Hall, 177, 178
Constabulary (N.-E. Rhodesia), Fort Jameson, arrival at, 70;
72, 75 impressions of, 71 et seq. ;
Crucifixes, and natives, 125 departure from, 121
Gumming, Gordon, 213 Fort Manning, 128
Fort Melangeni, 131
D Fortress at Mombasa, 170
Fortress of San Sebastian, 147
Dar-es-Salaam, German East Fotheringham, Monteith, buried
Africa, arrival at, 163; im¬ at Chinde, 142
pressions of, 163 et seq.; martial Fries, L. de, 68
aspect of, 165
Darius, 255
Darwinian theory, 234 G
Daybreak: in North-Western Gerenuk, 189, 197
Rhodesia, 29; on the Suswa Germany, in East Africa : treaty
Plains, 212 with Great Britain, 154; policy
Dedza, Boma and Mountain, and ambitions, 162 et seq.; and
Nyasaland, 131 Heligoland Convention, 167;
Dik-dik antelope, 196 on Victoria Nyanza, 239
Dombole, mission station, Nyasa¬ Giraffe, hunting along Guaso
land, 132 Nyiro, 191; voiceless, 192
Donkeys (pack): gun broken on, Grant’s gazelle, 189,192, 209, 211,
45; purchase of, 36; trouble 213, 224, 229
INDEX 263
Guaso Marra River, 184
K
Guaso Nyiro River (northern),
reached, 184; scenery and Kafue, copper mines, 20
fauna of, 185, 193 Kafue, station and river, 19
Guaso Nyiro River (southern), Kaliwera, Hill of, 59
reached, 222; departure from, Kalomo, impression of, 20
228 Kampala, native capital, Uganda,
Guinea-fowl, 47, 56 239
Kampi ya Nyama Yangu, 187
Kapatamoyo Hills, 73
H Kapene River, 132
Haenertsberg, journey to, 17 Kaponga’s village, 67
Haggard, Sir Rider, and African Kapsyiro’s village, 53
romances, 104, 163, 216 Kavirondo tribe, 239
Hannington, Bishop, 170 Kedong valley, 216, 220, 234
Harari, native name for Salisbury, Kemi, Coptic name for “ Egypt,’*
42 245
Harris, Cornwallis, 213 Kenia, Mount: beauty of, 180;
Hartebeeste: Lichtenstein’s, in height of, 178; march towards,
N.-W. Rhodesia, 22; Coke’s, 179; native name for, 180;
in East Africa, 177, 209, 227; near Nyeri, 204; say good-bye
Jackson’s, in East Africa, 200, to, 182
203, 236 Kijabe Mountain, 208; hunting
Hathor, 254 colobus monkeys on, 230
Heliopolis, 246 Kijabe, station, Uganda Railway,
Herodotus, on Egypt, 245 207, 234
Homem, Vasco Fernandes, Portu¬ Kikuyu escarpment, 207
guese navigator, 60 Kikuyu tribe, 178
Hope’s Farm, camp at, 38 Kilimanjaro Mountain, viewed
Horne, E. B., Commissioner at from near Tanga, 167; from
Meru, 187 Uganda Railway, 175
Hotels : in Tete, 44; in Nairobi, Kilindini, port of, near Mombasa,
212; in Egypt, 246 168
Hyaena, 217 Kinangop, Mount, 179
King’s African Rifles, in Nyasa-
I land, 131
Kipling, Rudyard, verses on
Impala antelope, 177, 189, 227 pioneering, 35
Inyaderi River, stay at, 45 Kisumu (or Port Florence), 238
Inyagui River, fording of, 39 Koodoo, horns at M’Rewas, 43;
Isis, 251 at Chiritzi River, 66; near
Ismailia, 246 Chifumbaze, 68
Kwamwendo, hunter boy, 22;
J and buffalo, 27
Jigger-flea, 221
Jombani Mountain, 182 L
Julius (Angoni servant): engaged, ‘* L.i?: companion to Fort Jameson,
38; fidelity of, 48; resources 36; and fever, 40, 41, 43, 67;
of as cook, 47; at Luia River, at the Ruenya, 56; reaches
67 Fort Jameson, 70
Jusef Jama (Somali servant), 218 Laishamunye Mountain, 185
264 INDEX
Lechwe antelope in Bangweolo chief), 73, 127; (native name
swamps, 118 for Fort Jameson), 42
Leopards, adventures with, 197 M’Pika, short stay at, 108
Lesseps, de, 255 M’Rewas, arrival at, 43; de¬
Lilongwe, Nyasaland Post, 128; parture from, 45
and river, 130 M’Rogoro Railway, 164
Lions: near Chiritzi River, 66; M’Tokos, incidents of stay at,
stories concerning, 83; and 46; departure from, 47; natives
Awemba, 95; life story of, of, engaged, 47 et seq.
112; becomes man-eater, 116; M’Wimbi Mountain, 182
and Uganda Railway, 175; Mackinnon, Sir Wm., 170
hunting along Guaso Nyiro Maggie’s Luck Mine, 68
River, 193; and protective Magwero mission station, 121
environment, 195; porters Maji Mowa River, 228
mauled by, 201; in Sotik, 208. Makupa bridge (Uganda Rail¬
213, 226, 229 way), 168
Lion’s Castle, 13 Mamelukes, 246
Lirangwe, 133 Mandala, Nyasaland, 133
Livingstone, Doctor, remembered Manica Road, Salisbury, de¬
by natives, 97; and Bangweolo, parture from, 37
118 Manning, General Sir Wm., 132
Livingstone (town), visited, 19 Margaret, Mount, 207, 209
Loangwa River, 66 Marsabit, 186, 192
Loita Plain, 223, 225 Masai, and N’Derobo, 237; and
Longonot Mountain, 207, 212, Genesis, 90; and Uganda Rail¬
216 way, 174; in Sotik, 225;
Lorian Swamp, 185 wagon driver, 218
Lourengo Marques, gateway of Mashona (M’Swina) tribe, char¬
Transvaal, 146 acteristics of, 40; and supersti¬
Lozeras, 242 tions, 42
Luangwa River (and valley): Masoka, Hill of, 48
heat in, 80; a typical village in, Massengere, tribe, 138
96; author and elephants in, Matope, Nyasaland, 133
103; heat in, 103; game of, Mau escarpment, 216, 220, 236
compared with East Africa, 185 Memphis, 250
Luchembe, Awemba chief, 106 Meneptah, 246
Luenya River. See Ruenya. Mengo, 242
Luia River, 66 Menzaleh, Lake, 256
Lukanga River, journey towards, Meru tribe and East Africa
32 Government Post, 178, 182,
Luvembe’s village, native dance 183, 184
at, 23 Milton, quotation from, 257
Missions and Missionaries: at
M Chisawasha, 38; comparison
with Native Commissioners,
M’Bushla tribe, 46 107; at Magwero, 121; views
M’Chinga (or Muchinga) Moun¬ on, 122; in Nyasaland, 123;
tains, camp at foot of, 103; near Meru, 183
scaled, 108 Mohamed Ali, Mosque of, at
M’Fen River, camp at, 39 Cairo, 246
M’Lungushi River, camp at, 22 Mohamed, Somali headman, 201
M’Pezeni (paramount Angoni 204
INDEX 265
Molimbwe Mountains, view to, 48 in German East Africa, 166;
Molo, East Africa, 236 superstitions, 178,216; thought¬
Mombasa, history of, 168; ap¬ lessness of, 219; politeness of,
pearance, 169; club at, 171 in Uganda, 242
Mosques, in Zanzibar, 156; in Neumann, Arthur H., 186
Cairo, 246, 247 Nile, River, speculation as to
Mount N’Onza, 66 sources, 145; at Jinja, 242;
Mozambique, fallen fame of, in lower Egypt, beauties of, 244
147; impressions of, 148; North-Eastern Rhodesia, entry
powder magazine blown up at, into, 70; departure from, 121
150; sunset at, 152 Nyamadzi River, camp by, 103
Muchinga Mountains. See Nyasa Lake, seen from Dedza,
M’Chinga. 131; sinking of waters in, 133
Mudzi River, 51 Nyasaland Protectorate, entry
Murchison Cataracts, 133 into, 121; and mission influ¬
Musanga, Portuguese fort, 54 ence, 121 et seq. ; founding of,
Mushukulumbwe (Baila) tribe, 94 127; transport difficulties of,
Mutua, Suka Kikuyu chief, 180 133
Mweru Lake, 116 Nyeri, East African Government
Mwomboshi, 21 Post, 178; porter left in
hospital, 203
N
N’Cheu Boma, Nyasaland, 132 O
N?Derobo tribe, 233; and colobus Okote, Kavirondo “ askari,” 202
monkeys, 234; near Molo, 237, Ongorra Narok River, 221, 228
238. See also 50 Oryx Beisa, 189, 196
N’Dia Kuu, Zanzibar street, 155 Osiris, 251
N^Tanta village and chief, 96 Outram, professional hunter, 229
N’Temia, on Shire River, 134
N’Ungwe, native name for Tete, 42
Nairobi, capital British East P
Africa, 172; departure from, Paracelsus, panacea of, 244
177; return to, 204; impres¬ Parker, Bishop, 170
sions of, 205 Pemba Island, 152
Naivasha, Lake, beauty of, 236 Peters, Dr. Carl, 167
Nandi, campaign against, 174 Pharaohs, 246
Native Commissioner, the life of, Pithom, 253
74 et seq. ; 80 et seq. ; and Polo, Marco, historian, on Zanzi¬
missionaries, 107; in Nyasaland, bar, 153
129; at Port Herald and Chi- Pompona Island, 138
romo, 137 Porcupine, 227
Natives: bartering propensities, Port Florence. See Kisumu.
53; beggar on the Ruenya, 58; Port Herald, Nyasaland, 134;
folklore, 87; and Biblical heat at, 137
stories, 90, 179; riddles, 91; Port Said, 255; sins of, 256
sayings, 92; songs, 93; and Portuguese: in Tete, 60; fallen
reincarnation, 95; signs in the greatness of, 61, 146; ancient
bush used by, 57; idleness of, navigators, 60,148; Command¬
98; influence of Native Com¬ ant at Chiuta, 65; in East
missioners, 107; and missions, Africa, 145; commercial power,
121 et seq. ; in Nyasaland, 129; 146
266 INDEX
Portuguese East Africa, arrival Sakkara, Pyramids of, 250
at frontier of, 51; general char¬ Salisbury, arrival and departure,
acteristics of, 52; roads in, 64; 37
hospitable country, 65 Sam (native servant), 37; runs
Postma, hire of wagon from, 209 away, 48
“ Prazo n system, 68,150 San Sebastian, fortress of, 147
Prospector, life of, 32 et seq.
Scott, Dr. Ruffel, 133
Q Selous and Mushukulumbwe, 94
Quilimane, possibilities of, 135, Semiramis Hotel, 246
143 Serval cat, 200
Sese Islands, 242
R
Seyyid Bargash, Sultan of Zanzi¬
Railways: Cape to Cairo, 17; bar, 158
Shire Highlands, 133, 136; Shangara (old Portuguese fort),
cost of, in Africa, 135; in 54
German East Africa, 164, 166; Shepheard’s Hotel, 246
terminus of Uganda Railway, Shire River, 132, 133, 138
168; cost of, and reasons for Shupanga, Jesuit Mission, 139
building Uganda Railway, 174; Sibi River, 229
scenery of, 175, 207; in Egypt, Sikhs, in Africa, 131
244, 250 Situtunga antelope in Bangweolo
Rainey, P. J., and lions, 208, 226 swamps, 119
Rameses, 252, 253 Sleeping sickness, u Z.n and, 82;
Reed-buck (Chandler’s), 227 in Bangweolo swamps, 118,
Rendile, land of the, 199 119; in Uganda, 242
Rhinoceros, in N.-E. Rhodesia, Somalis, as gun-bearers, 194, 217
109; so-called varieties of, 111; Sotik, journey to, 208
and Uganda Railway, 175; Sphinx, mystery of, 248; tradi¬
photographing, 187; adven¬ tion concerning, 248
tures with, 189, 196 Stairs, Lieutenant, buried at
Rhodes, reflections on, 17, 22 Chinde, 142
Rhodesia, Native Labour Bureau, Suez, arrival at, 243; canal, 256
boys met on road, 42; and Sugar industry (on the Zambesi),
Nyasaland, 131 139
Rift (Great) Valley, 207, 216 Suka Kikuyu tribe, 179; treach¬
Ripon Falls, Uganda, 240 ery of, 180
Rivi Rivi, Nyasaland, 132 Sultan of Zanzibar, 158
Rongui River, East Africa, 204 Sumatwa, N^Derobo native, 237
Ruenya (or Luenya) River, Suswa Mountain, 207, 212, 216
reached, 54; bathed in, 55; Swahili, natives of Mombasa, 171
gold in, 55; famous tree by Swamps, around Lakes Bangweolo
side of, 59; confluence with and Mweru, 116; curious
Mazoe, 59 fascination of, 118
Rumuruti, Government Post,
East Africa, 179
Ruo River, Nyasaland, 134 T
Table Mountain, 13
Tana River, East Africa, 179
S Tanga, German East Africa, ap¬
Sable antelope, in Nyasaland, 128 pearance of, 166
Sagana River, near Fort Hall, 178 Tel-el-Kebir, battlefield of, 245
INDEX 267
Tete, arrival at, 59; character¬ W
istics of, 60 et seq.; departure
from, 64 Wa-Meru tribe, legend of, 179;
Tetie, in Nyasaland, 130 fighting propensities of, 183
Thika River, East Africa, 177 Wa-Unga tribe, in swamps, 118
Thomson’s gazelle, 200, 210, 214, Waller’s gazelle. See Gerenuk.
215, 217, 227 Walonga tribe, night dance of, 24
Thoth, 249, 253 Wanderlust, 32, 34
Timbwe Island, 143 Water-buck, Sing Sing variety,
Tippoo Tib, 155 23; at Luia River, 66
Tom (native servant), 37; runs Waters, Richard P., American
away, 48 Consul at Zanzibar, 154
Topi antelope, 228 Weise, Carl, 68
Transvaal, Northern, journey to, Wezi River, 51
17 Wild animals : and daybreak, 30;
Tsama River, journey to, 17 along Uganda Railway, 175,
Tsetse fly, near Mwomboshi, 29; 176; in Africa, 185; along
in N.-E. Rhodesia, 111, 119 Guaso Nyiro, 183; and pro¬
Tshanoia River, camp at, 41 tective environment, 195; and
animal telepathy, 210, 213
Wildebeeste, 223
U Witwatersrand Native Labour
Bureau, in Nyasaland, 130
Uasin Gishu Plateau, 237
Uganda Protectorate, beauty of, Y
241; sleeping sickness in, 242
Uganda Railway: terminus of, “ Y.,n his adventure in the
168; cost of, and reasons for Congo, 85
building, 174; scenery along, Yaos tribe, of Nyasaland, 127
175, 207; and wild animals, 175
Usoga, 240 Z
Zagazig, town of, 246
V Zambesi River: at the Victoria
Falls 18; at Tete, 59; scenery
Vasco da Gama, Portuguese navi¬ of lower river, 139; difficulty in
gator, 146; street in Mombasa, navigating, 139
171 Zanzibar: history of, 153; ship¬
Victoria Falls, impressions of, 18 ping at, 153; descriptions of,
Victoria Nyanza, 216; largest 155; mosques, 156; rulers,
lake, 238; descriptions of, 239 158; reflections as to future,
et seq. 159; plantations of, 159
Villa Bocage, Portuguese East Zebra, at Chiritzi River, 66; in
Africa, 134 East Africa, 203, 209
Vubwe River, 68 Zomba, Nyasaland, 130
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.„
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

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O Smithsonian

THE BONDS OF AFRICA

OWEN LETCHER, F.R.G.S.

Daily Telegraph.—“Descriptions, opinions, and information

Morning Post.—“There are some really delightful descrip¬

Pall Mall Gazette.—“ An acceptable addition to African travel

Johannesburg Star.—“ Mr. Owen Letcher has brought the

JOHN LONG, LTD., LONDON

OWEN LETCHER, F.R.G.S.

WITH FIFTY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

“THE legion of the lost ones”

“THE COHORT OF THE DAMNED”

II North-Western Rhodesia . . . .17

IY Portuguese East Africa . . . .52

Y North-Eastern Rhodesia . . . .70

YI North-Eastern Rhodesia (continued) . . 87

YII North-Eastern Rhodesia (continued) . .100

YIII Nyasaland and the Lower Zambesi . .121

IX The East Coast.145

X The East Coast (continued) . . . .161

XI British East Africa.174

XII British East Africa (continued) . . .185

XIII British East Africa (continued) . . . 207

XYI Egypt. . 243

XYII Egypt (continued) ..... , 250

XYIII Finis. . 259

Index ....... . 261

Crossing the Ruenya River, Portuguese East

The Victoria Falls, Zambesi River, in Full Flood 18

The Devil’s Cataract, Victoria Falls ... 18

The Kafue River, spanned by the Longest Bridge

Buffalo Cow and Native Hunters .... 26

Buffalo Hunting in North-Western Rhodesia. A

A Puku Shot near the Great Lukanga Swamp . 30

Colonel Carden’s Barotse Police Boys, Broken

One of the Mineralized Kopjes at Broken Hill,

One of our Donkeys crossing the Inyagui River 38

A Typical Mashona Family; Tshanoia River . . 42

Prospector’s Camp; Mashonaland .... 60

Portuguese Gun-boat on the Zambesi at Tete . 62

Native Archer; Portuguese Northern Zambesia . 68

Cutting up a Hippo; Luangwa River ... 74

Puku Antelope, a Water-loving Buck; Northern

Elephant; Luangwa Valley.102

Native Woman; Northern Rhodesia .... 116

A Fine Reedbuck Head; Northern Rhodesia . . 116

A Wart Hog; British Central Africa . . . 130

On “IJlendo”; British Central Africa . . . 130

Roan Antelope ; British Central Africa . . . 140

Delagoa Bay: the Gateway of the Transvaal . 146

Bronson and the Beira Express .... 146

In Sandy Beira: the Gateway of Rhodesia . . 146

Street Scene in Zanzibar ...... 156

The Gateway of Port San Sebastian, Mozambique . 156

A Fine Old Arab Doorway, Zanzibar . . .156

The Old Fort, Mombasa ..168

Indian Snake Charmer, Mombasa .... 168

Falls on the Chania River between Nairobi and

A Group of Kikuyu on the Embu Road . . . 176

The Author and a Buffalo near Embu . . . 180