Impressions of South Africa Part 11

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

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

The town itself is built at the foot of a low, wooded hill, on the top of which stood the original fort, hastily constructed of loose stones in 1890, and occupied in serious earnest for defence during the Matabili war. It spreads over a wide s.p.a.ce of ground, with houses scattered here and there, and has become, since the draining of the marshy land on the banks of a streamlet which runs through it, free from malaria and quite healthy. Though the sun heat was great in the end of October (for one is only eighteen degrees from the equator), the air was so fresh and dry that I could walk for miles in the full blaze of noon, and the nights were too cool to sit out on the _stoep_ (the wooden verandah which one finds at the front of every South African house) without an overcoat.

Just round the town the country is open and gra.s.sy, but the horizon in every direction is closed by woods. The views are far prettier than those from Bulawayo, and the position of the town makes it a better centre for the administration as well as the commerce of the Company's territories. It is only two hundred and twenty miles from the Zambesi at Tete, and only three hundred and seventy from the port of Beira. The Company did well to encourage the growth of Bulawayo immediately after the conquest of 1893, because it was necessary to explore and to establish order in the newest parts of its territory. But in the long run, and especially when the regions north of the Zambesi begin to be practically occupied, Bulawayo, standing in a corner of the country, will have to yield to the more imperial site of Fort Salisbury. The district which lies round the latter town is better watered than western Matabililand, and the soil richer both for pasture and for tillage. The rainfall for the year ending April, 1890, reached fifty-three inches, and the average is about forty.

Fort Salisbury is three years older than Bulawayo, and therefore much more advanced. It has even several churches. There is a colony of East Indians, who grow vegetables and get very high prices for them; and a considerable trade is done in supplying the needs of the mining districts to the north and west. Many gold-reefs lie out in those directions, and great hopes are entertained of their future, though at the time of my visit people were much busier in floating new companies to develop the mines than in taking steps for their actual development.

Some very pretty country residences, in the style of Indian bungalows, have been built on the skirts of the wood a mile or two from the town; and street-lamps now light people to their homes along paths where four years ago lions were still encountered. The last lion recoiling in dismay from the first street lamp would be a good subject for a picture to ill.u.s.trate the progress of Mashonaland.

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

Having consulted the prophet of the Matoppo Hills, who told her she would be killed, she cheerfully accepted this way out of the difficulty, and was accordingly sent away and strangled.]

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

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

[Footnote 49: See his book, published in the end of 1896, ent.i.tled _Suns.h.i.+ne and Storm in Rhodesia_. I do not gather from it how far, in his opinion, what went on was known to the higher officials.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVI

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

In Africa, moisture is everything. It makes the difference between fertility and barrenness; it makes the difference between a cheerful and a melancholy landscape. As one travels north-eastward from Palapshwye to Bulawayo, and from Bulawayo to Fort Salisbury, one pa.s.ses by degrees from an arid and almost rainless land to a land of showers and flowing waters. In Bechua.n.a.land there are, except for three months in the year, no streams at all. In Matabililand one begins to find perennial brooks.

In Mashonaland there are at last rivers, sometimes with rocky banks and clear deep pools, which (like that just mentioned) tempt one to bathe and risk the terrible snap of a crocodile's jaws. Thus eastern Mashonaland is far more attractive than the countries which I have described in the last two chapters. It has beautiful and even striking scenery. The soil, where the granitic rocks do not come too near the surface, is usually fertile, and cultivation is easier than in the regions to the south-west, because the rains are more copious. There are many places round Fort Salisbury and on the way thence to Mtali and Ma.s.sikessi where a man might willingly settle down to spend his days, so genial and so full of beauty is the nature around him. And as the land is high, it is also healthy. Except in a few of the valley bottoms, fever need not be feared, even after the rains.

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

For the first forty miles south-eastward from Fort Salisbury the track runs through a wooded country, diversified by broad stretches of pasture. Here and there we found a European farm, marked in the distance by the waving tops of the gum-trees, with the low wooden house festooned by the brilliant mauve blossoms of the climbing bougainvillea, and the garden enclosed by hedges of grenadilla, whose fruit is much eaten in South Africa. Vegetables raised on these farms fetch enormous prices in the town, so that a man who understands the business may count on making more by this than he will do by "prospecting" for gold mines, or even by floating companies. We found the gra.s.s generally fresh and green, for some showers had fallen, and the trees, though still small, were in new leaf with exquisite tints of red. Now and then, through gaps between the nearer hills, there are glimpses of dim blue mountains. As one gets farther to the south-east the hills are higher, and on either side there rise fantastic kopjes of granite. Their tops are cleft and riven by deep fissures, and huge detached blocks are strewn about at their base, or perched like gigantic tables upon the tops of pillars of rock, poised so finely that one fancies a blast of wind might overthrow them. These "perched blocks," however, have not, like the _blocs perches_ of Western Europe, been left by ancient glaciers or icebergs, for it seems still doubtful whether there has been a glacial period in South Africa, and neither here nor in the mountains of Basutoland could I discover traces of ancient moraines. They are due to the natural decomposition of the rock on the spot. The alternate heat of the day and cold of the night--a cold which is often great, owing to the radiation into a cloudless sky--split the ma.s.ses by alternate expansion and contraction, make great flakes peel off them like the coats of an onion, and give them these singularly picturesque shapes. All this part of the country is as eminently fit for a landscape painter as Bechua.n.a.land and the more level parts of Matabililand are unfit, seeing that here, one has foregrounds as well as backgrounds, and the colours are as rich as the forms are varied. For I must add that in this region, instead of the monotonous th.o.r.n.y acacias of the western regions, there is much variety in the trees; no tropical luxuriance,--the air is still too dry for that,--but many graceful outlines and a great diversity of foliage.

Besides, the wood has a way of disposing itself with wonderful grace.

There is none of the monotony either of pine forests, like those of Northern and Eastern Europe, or of such forests of deciduous trees as one sees in Michigan and the Alleghanies, but rather what in England we call "park-like scenery," though why nature should be supposed to do best when she imitates art, I will not attempt to inquire. There are belts of wood inclosing secluded lawns, and groups of trees dotted over a stretch of rolling meadow, pretty little bits of detail which enhance the charm of the ample sweeps of view that rise and roll to the far-off blue horizon.

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

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

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

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

It is not easy to find one's way alone over the country in these parts, where no Kafir speaks English or even Dutch, and where the network of native foot-paths crossing one another soon confuses recollection.

However, having a distant mountain-peak to steer my course by, I succeeded in making my way back alone, and was pleased to find that, though the sun was now high in heaven and I had neither a sun-helmet nor a white umbrella, its rays did me no harm. A stranger, however, can take liberties with the sun which residents hold it safer not to take.

Europeans in these countries walk as little as they can, especially in the heat of the day. They would ride, were horses attainable, but the horse-sickness makes it extremely difficult to find or to retain a good animal. All travelling for any distance is of course done in a waggon or (where one can be had) in a Cape cart.

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

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

Mtali--it is often written "Umtali" to express that vague half-vowel which comes at the beginning of so many words in the Bantu languages--is a pretty little settlement in a valley whose sheltered position would make it oppressive but for the strong easterly breeze which blows nearly every day during the hot weather. There is plenty of good water in the hills all round, and the higher slopes are green with fresh gra.s.s. The town, like other towns in these regions, is constructed of corrugated iron,--for wood is scarce and dear,--with a few brick-walled houses and a fringe of native huts, while the outskirts are deformed by a thick deposit of empty tins of preserved meat and petroleum. All the roofs are of iron, and a prudent builder puts iron also into the foundation of the walls beneath the brick, in order to circ.u.mvent the white ants. These insects are one of the four plagues of South Central Africa. (The other three are locusts, horse-sickness, and fever; some add a fifth--the speculators in mining shares.) They destroy every sc.r.a.p of organic matter they can reach, and will even eat their way through brick to reach wood or any other vegetable matter. Nothing but metal stops them.

They work in the dark, constructing a kind of tunnel or gallery if they have to pa.s.s along an open s.p.a.ce, as, for instance, to reach books upon a shelf. (I was taken to see the public library at Mtali, and found they had destroyed nearly half of it.) They are less than half an inch long, of a dull greyish white, the queen, or female, about three times as large as the others. Her quarters are in a sort of nest deep in the ground, and if this nest can be found and destroyed, the plague will be stayed, for a time at least. There are several other kinds of ants. The small red ant gets among one's provisions and devours the cold chicken.

We spent weary hours in trying to get them out of our food-boxes, being unable to fall in with the local view that they ought to be eaten with the meat they swarm over, as a sort of relish to it. There is also the large reddish-black ant, which bites fiercely, but is regarded with favour because it kills the white ants when it can get at them. But the white ant is by far the most pernicious kind, and a real curse to the country.

At the end of 1896, when the construction of the Beira railway from Chimoyo to Fort Salisbury began to be energetically prosecuted, it was found that to take the line past Mtali would involve a detour of some miles and a heavy gradient in crossing a ridge at the Christmas Pa.s.s.

Mr. Rhodes promptly determined, instead of bringing the railway to the town, to bring the town to the railway. Liberal compensation was accordingly paid to all those who had built houses at old Mtali, and new Mtali was in 1897 founded on a carefully selected site seven miles away.

In 1895 there were about one hundred Europeans in the town of Mtali, all, except the Company's officials and the storekeepers, engaged in prospecting for or beginning to work gold-mines; for this is the centre of one of the first-explored gold districts, and sanguine hopes have been entertained of its reefs. We drove out to see some of the most promising in the Penha Longa Valley, six miles to the eastward. Here three sets of galleries have been cut, and the extraction of the metal was said to be ready to begin if the machinery could be brought up from the coast. As to the value and prospects of the reefs, over which I was most courteously shown by the gentlemen directing the operations, I could of course form no opinion. They are quartz-reefs, occurring in talcose and chloritic schistose rocks, and some of them maintain their direction for many miles. There is no better place than this valley[53]

for examining the ancient gold-workings, for here they are of great size. Huge ma.s.ses of alluvial soil in the bottom of the valley had evidently been turned over, and indeed a few labourers were still at work upon these. But there had also been extensive open cuttings all along the princ.i.p.al reefs, the traces of which are visible in the deep trenches following the line of the reefs up and down the slopes of the hills, and in the ma.s.ses of rubbish thrown out beside them. Some of these cuttings are evidently recent, for the sides are in places steep and even abrupt, which they would not be if during many years the rains had been was.h.i.+ng the earth down into the trenches. Moreover, iron implements have been found at the bottom, of modern shapes and very little oxidized. Probably, therefore, while some of these workings may be of great antiquity, others are quite recent--perhaps less than a century old. Such workings occur in many places over Mashonaland and Matabililand. They are always open; that is to say, the reef was worked down from the surface, not along a tunnel--a fact which has made people think that they were carried on by natives only; and they almost always stop when water is reached, as though the miners had known nothing of pumps. Tradition has nothing to say as to the workings; but we know that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a good deal of gold was brought down to the Portuguese coast stations; and when the Mashonaland pioneers came in 1890, there were a few Portuguese trying to get the metal out of the alluvial deposits along the stream banks. The reefs, which are now being followed by level shafts or galleries driven into the sides of the hills, are (in most cases at least) the same as those which the old miners attacked from above.

North of Penha Longa lies an attractive bit of country, near a place called Inyanga, which, unfortunately, we had not time to visit. It is a sort of tableland about thirty miles long by fifteen wide, from 6000 to 7000 feet above sea-level, with the highest summits reaching 8000 feet; and in respect of its height enjoys not only a keen and bracing air, but a copious rainfall, which makes it a specially good grazing country. It will probably one day become not only the choicest ranching-ground of East Central Africa, but also a health resort from the surrounding regions. At present it is quite empty, the land having been, as I was told, bought up by several syndicates, who are holding it in hope of a rise in prices. Here are the remarkable stone-cased pits, referred to in Chapter IX.; and here there are also numerous ancient artificial watercourses for irrigating the soil, which were constructed by some race of immigrants accustomed to artificial irrigation in their own country, for it would hardly have occurred to natives to construct such works here, where the rainfall is sufficient for the needs of tillage.

Still farther to the north is a less elevated region, remarkable for the traces it bears of having been at one time densely populated. Tillage was so extensive that the very hillsides were built up into terraces to be planted with crops. To-day there are hardly any inhabitants, for a good many years ago Mzila, the father of Gungunhana, chief of a fierce and powerful tribe which lives on the lower course of the Sabi River, raided all this country, and in successive invasions killed off or chased away the whole population. Such wholesale slaughter and devastation is no uncommon thing in the annals of South Africa. Tshaka, the uncle of Cetewayo, annihilated the inhabitants over immense tracts round Zululand. And in comparison with such bloodthirsty methods the a.s.syrian plan of deporting conquered populations from their homes to some distant land may have seemed, and indeed may have been, a substantial step in human progress. However, just when Tshaka was ma.s.sacring his Kafir neighbours, the Turks were ma.s.sacring the Christians of Chios, and at the time of our visit, in October, 1895, Abdul-Hamid II. was beginning his ma.s.sacres in Asia Minor; so perhaps the less said about progress the better.

The track from Mtali to the sea crosses a high ridge at a point called the Christmas Pa.s.s, and descends into Portuguese territory through some very n.o.ble and varied mountain scenery.[54] It reminded us sometimes of the Italian slopes of the Eastern Alps, sometimes of the best parts of the Perths.h.i.+re Highlands, though of course it was rather in the forms of hill and valley than in the trees that clothed their slopes that this resemblance lay. The first Portuguese settlement is at a place called Macequece, or Ma.s.sikessi, where the pioneers of the British South Africa Company conducted in 1891 a little war on their own account with the Portuguese, whose superior forces they routed. The Portuguese claimed all this inland region on the Hinterland principle, in respect of their owners.h.i.+p of the coast, while the British pioneers relied on the fact that their adversaries had never established a really effective occupation. The dispute was carried by the Portuguese Mozambique Company into the English courts of law,[55] and was ultimately adjusted diplomatically by an agreement between the British and Portuguese governments, signed June 11, 1891. The delimitation of the frontiers was not fully completed in this region till 1896, but Ma.s.sikessi was by the treaty of 1891 left to Portugal. After Ma.s.sikessi the mountains recede, and wide plains begin to open to the east and south. As the country sinks, the temperature rises and the air grows heavier and less keen.

The ground is covered with wood, and in the woods along the streams a few palms and bamboos and other tropical forms of vegetation begin to appear.[56] But we found the woods in many places stripped bare.

Terrible swarms of locusts had pa.s.sed, leaving a track of dismal bareness. It had been a dry year, too, and even what gra.s.s the locusts had spared was thin and withered. Thus for want of food the cattle had perished. All along the road from Mtali we saw oxen lying dead, often by some pool in a brook, to which they had staggered to drink, and where they lay down to die. We encountered few waggons, and those few were almost all standing with the team unyoked, some of their beasts dead or sickly, some, too weak to draw the load farther, obliged to stand idly where they had halted till the animals should regain strength, or fresh oxen be procured. This is what a visitation of locusts means, and this is how the progress of a country is r.e.t.a.r.ded by the stoppage of the only means of transport.

We reached the terminus of the railway at Chimoyo after two days' long and fatiguing travel from Mtali, including an upset of our vehicle in descending a steep donga to the bed of a streamlet--an upset which might easily have proved serious, but gave us nothing worse than a few bruises. The custom being to start a train in the afternoon and run it through the night,--all trains were then special,--we had plenty of time to look round the place, and fortunately found a comfortable store and a most genial Scottish landlord from Banffs.h.i.+re. There was, however, nothing to see, not even Portuguese local colour; for though Chimoyo is well within the Portuguese frontier, the village is purely English, and was living by the transport service which then made the end of the railway its starting-point for the territories of the Company. Now that it has become merely a station, the railway being now (1899) open all the way to Fort Salisbury, it may have dwindled away. Having nothing else to do, I climbed through the sultry noon to the top of the nearest kopje, a steep granite hill which, as I was afterwards told, is a favourite "house of call" for lions. No forest monarch, however, presented himself to welcome me, and I was left to enjoy the view alone.

It was striking. Guarding the western horizon rose the long chain of mountains from which we had emerged stretching in a huge arc from south-east to north, with some bold outlying peaks flung forward from the main ma.s.s, all by their sharp, stern outlines, in which similar forms were constantly repeated, showing that they were built of the same hard crystalline rocks. Beneath, the country spread out in a vast, wooded plain, green or brown, according as the wood was denser in one part and spa.r.s.er in another. It was still low wood, with no sense of tropical luxuriance about it, and the ground still dry, with not a glimpse of water anywhere. Here and there out of this sea of forest rose isolated heights whose abrupt craggy tops glistened in the sunlight. To the east the plain fell slowly away to an immensely distant horizon, where lay the deadly flats that border the Indian Ocean. Except where the iron roofs of the huts at Chimoyo shone, there was not a sign of human dwelling or human labour through this great wild country, lying still and monotonous under a cloudless sky. It has been a wilderness from the beginning of the world until now, traversed, no doubt, many centuries ago by the gold-seekers whose favourite track went up from the coast past Great Zimbabwye into what is now Matabililand, traversed again occasionally in later times by Portuguese traders, but in no wise altered during these thousands of years from its original aspect. Now at last its turn has come. A new race of gold-seekers have built a railway, and along the railway, wherever there are not swamps to breed fever, the land will be taken for farms, and the woods will be cut down, and the wild beasts will slink away, and trading-posts will grow into villages, and the journey from Beira to Bulawayo will become as easy and familiar as is to-day the journey from Chicago to San Francisco, through a country which a century ago was as little known as this African wilderness.

The railway from Chimoyo to the sea had in 1895 one of the narrowest gauges in the world (two feet), and its tiny locomotives and cars wore almost a toy air. It has since been widened to the three feet six gauge of the other South African lines. The construction was difficult, for the swampy lands along the coast are largely under water during the rains, but the gain to the country has been enormous. Not only has the railway abridged the toilsome and costly ox transport of goods from Beira to the edge of the high country--a transport whose difficulty lay not merely in the badness of the track through ground almost impa.s.sable during and after the rains, but also in the prevalence of the tsetse-fly, whose bite is fatal to cattle. It has enabled travellers to cross in a few hours one of the most unhealthy regions in the world, most of which is infested by fevers in and after the wet season, and the lower parts of which are so malarious that few who spend three nights in them, even in the dry season, escape an attack. The banks of the rivers and other damper spots will continue to breed this curse of maritime Africa, although things will doubtless improve when the country grows more settled, and the marshes have been drained, and the long gra.s.s has been eaten down by cattle; for when the tsetse-fly has ceased to be dangerous cattle may come in. It appears that the fly kills cattle not by anything poisonous in its bite, but because it communicates to them a minute parasite which lives in the blood of some kinds of game, and which is more pernicious to cattle than it is to the game. Accordingly, when the game vanishes, the fly either vanishes also or becomes comparatively harmless. Already places once infested by it have by the disappearance of the game become available for ranching. Recent researches seem to have shown that malarial fevers in man are also due to an animal parasite: and this discovery is thought to damp the hope, which I remember to have heard Mr. Darwin express, that the fever-stricken regions of the tropics might become safe by ascertaining what the fever microbe is and securing men against it by inoculation.

Those, however, who hold that this parasite is carried into the blood of man by a mosquito seem to entertain some hope that drainage may in some places almost expunge the mosquito. The railway was made entirely by native labour gathered from the surrounding regions, and the contractors told me they had less difficulty with the Kafirs than they expected. It paid, however, a heavy toll in European life. Not one of the engineers and foremen escaped fever, and many died. The risk for those employed on the line is of course now much slighter, because the worst spots are known and there are now houses to sleep in.

Shortly after leaving Chimoyo the train ran through a swarm of locusts miles long. It was a beautiful sight. The creatures flash like red snowflakes in the sun; the air glitters with their gauzy wings. But it is also terrible. An earthquake or a volcanic eruption is hardly more destructive and hardly more irresistible. The swarms may be combated when the insect walks along the ground, for then trenches may be dug into which the advancing host falls. But when it flies nothing can stop it. It is noteworthy that for eighteen years prior to the arrival of the British pioneers in 1890 there had been no great swarms. Since that year there have been several; so the Kafir thinks that it is the white man's coming that has provoked the powers of evil to send this plague as well as the murrain.

We ran down the one hundred and eighteen miles from Chimoyo to Fontesvilla during the afternoon and night, halting for three or four hours for dinner at a clearing where an inn and store have been built.

The pace was from ten to fifteen miles an hour. After the first twenty miles, during which one still has glimpses of the strange isolated peaks that spring up here and there from the plain, the scenery becomes rather monotonous, for the line runs most of the way through thick forest, the trees higher than those of the interior, yet not of any remarkable beauty. For the last twenty-five miles the railway traverses a dead and dreary flat. The gentle rise of the ground to the west conceals even the outlying spurs of the great range behind, and to the north and south there is an unbroken level. The soil is said to be generally poor, a very thin layer of vegetable mould lying over sand, and the trees are few and seldom tall. It is a country full of all sorts of game, from buffaloes, elands, and koodoos downward to the small antelopes; and as game abounds, so also do lions abound. The early morning is the time when most of these creatures go out to feed, and we strained our eyes as soon as there was light enough to make them out from the car windows.

But beyond some wild pig and hartebeest, and a few of the smaller antelopes, nothing could be discerned upon the pastures or among the tree clumps. Perhaps the creatures have begun to learn that the railroad brings their enemies, and keep far away from it. A year after our visit the murrain, to which I have already referred, appeared in this region, and wrought fearful devastation among the wild animals, especially the buffaloes.

The railway now runs all the way to the port of Beira, but in October, 1895, came to an end at a place called Fontesvilla, on the Pungwe River, near the highest point to which the tide rises. We had therefore to take to the water in order to reach Beira, where a German steamer was timed to call two days later; and our friends in Mashonaland had prepared us to expect some disagreeable experiences on the river, warning us not to a.s.sume that twelve or fourteen hours would be enough, even in a steamer, to accomplish the fifty miles of navigation that lie between Fontesvilla and the sea. They had been specially insistent that we should remain in Fontesvilla itself no longer than was absolutely necessary; for Fontesvilla has the reputation of being the most unhealthy spot in all this unhealthy country. We were told that the preceding year had been a salubrious one, for only forty-two per cent. of the European residents had died. There may have been in these figures, when closely scrutinized, some element of exaggeration, but the truth they were intended to convey is beyond dispute; and the bright young a.s.sistant superintendent of the railroad was mentioned, with evident wonder, as the only person who had been more than three months in the place without a bad attack of fever. Fontesvilla has not the externals of a charnel-house. It consists of seven or eight scattered frame houses, with roofs of corrugated iron, set in a dull, featureless flat on the banks of a muddy river. The air is sultry and depressing, but has not that foul swamp smell with which Poti, on the Black Sea, reeks, the most malarious spot I had ever before visited. Nor was there much stagnant water visible; indeed, the ground seemed dry, though there are marshes hidden among the woods on the other side of the river. As neither of the steamers that ply on the Pungwe could come up at neap tides, and with the stream low,--for the rains had not yet set in,--the young superintendent (to whose friendly help we were much beholden) had bespoken a rowboat to come up for us from the lower part of the river.

After waiting from eight till half-past ten o'clock for this boat, we began to fear it had failed us, and, hastily engaging a small two-oared one that lay by the bank, set off in it down the stream. Fortunately after two and a half miles the other boat, a heavy old tub, was seen slowly making her way upward, having on board the captain of the little steam-launch, the launch herself being obliged to remain much lower down the river. We transferred ourselves and our effects to this boat, and floated gaily down, thinking our troubles over.

The Pungwe is here about one hundred yards wide, but very shallow, and with its water so turbid that we could not see the bottom where the depth exceeded two feet. It was noon; the breeze had dropped, and the sun was so strong that we gladly took refuge in the little cabin or rather covered box--a sort of hen coop--at the stern. The stream and the tide were with us, and we had four native rowers, but our craft was so heavy that we accomplished less than two miles an hour. As the channel grew wider and the current spread itself hither and thither over sand banks, the bed became more shallow, and from time to time we grounded.

When this happened, the native rowers jumped into the water and pushed or pulled the boat along. The farther down we went, and the more the river widened, so much the more often did we take the bottom, and the harder did we find it to get afloat again. Twelve miles below Fontesvilla, a river called the Bigimiti comes in on the right, and at its mouth we took on board a bold young English sportsman with the skin of a huge lion. Below the confluence, where a maze of sand banks enc.u.mbers the channel, we encountered a strong easterly breeze. The big clumsy boat made scarcely any way against it, and stuck upon the sand so often that the Kafirs, who certainly worked with a will, were more than half the time in the water up to their knees, tugging and shoving to get her off. Meanwhile the tide, what there was of it, was ebbing fast, and the captain admitted that if we did not get across these shoals within half an hour we should certainly lie fast upon them till next morning at least, and how much longer no one could tell. It was not a pleasant prospect, for we had no food except some biscuits and a tin of cocoa, and a night on the Pungwe, with pestiferous swamps all round, meant almost certainly an attack of fever. Nothing, however, could be done beyond what the captain and the Kafirs were doing, so that suspense was weighted by no sense of personal responsibility. We moved alternately from stern to bow, and back from bow to stern, to lighten the boat at one end or the other, and looked to windward to see from the sharp curl of the waves whether the gusts which stopped our progress were freshening further. Fortunately they abated. Just as the captain seemed to be giving up hope--the only fault we had with him was that his face revealed too plainly his anxieties--we felt ourselves glide off into a deeper channel; the Kafirs jumped in and smote the dark-brown current with their oars, and the prospect of a restful night at Beira rose once more before us. But our difficulties were not quite over, for we grounded several times afterwards, and progress was so slow that it seemed very doubtful whether we should find and reach before dark the little steam-launch that had come up to meet us.

Ever since my childish imagination had been captivated by the picture of Africa's sunny fountains rolling down their golden sand, the idea of traversing a tropical forest on the bosom of a great African river had retained its fascination. Here at last was the reality, and what a dreary reality! The shallow, muddy stream, broken into many channels, which inclosed low, sandy islets, had spread to a width of two miles.

The alluvial banks, rising twenty feet in alternate layers of sand and clay, cut off any view of the country behind. All that could be seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of the forest that ran back from the river. Conspicuous among them was the ill-omened "fever tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark--the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air. Here was no luxuriant variety of form, no wealth of colour, no festooned creepers nor brilliant flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw reach after reach of the featureless stream spread out before us. Among the trees not a bird was to be seen or heard; few even fluttered on the bosom of the river. We watched for crocodiles sunning themselves on the sandspits, and once or twice thought we saw them some two hundred yards away, but they had always disappeared as we drew nearer. The beast is quick to take alarm at the slightest noise, and not only the paddles of a steamer, but even the plash of oars, will drive him into the water.

For his coyness we were partly consoled by the gambols of the river-horses. All round the boat these creatures were popping up their huge snouts and shoulders, splas.h.i.+ng about, and then plunging again into the swirling water. Fortunately none rose quite close to us, for the hippopotamus, even if he means no mischief, may easily upset a boat when he comes up under it, or may be induced by curiosity to submerge it with one bite of his strong jaws, in which case the pa.s.sengers are likely to have fuller opportunities than they desire of becoming acquainted with the crocodiles.

Among such sights the sultry afternoon wore itself slowly into night, and just as dark fell--it falls like a stage curtain in these lat.i.tudes--we joyfully descried the steam-launch waiting for us behind a sandy point. Once embarked upon her, we made better speed through the night. It was cloudy, with a struggling moon, which just showed us a labyrinth of flat, densely wooded isles, their margins fringed with mangrove trees. Exhausted by a journey of more than thirty hours without sleep, we were now so drowsy as to be in constant danger of falling off the tiny launch, which had neither seats nor bulwarks, and even the captain's strong tea failed to rouse us. Everything seemed like a dream--this lonely African river, with the faint moonlight glimmering here and there upon its dark bosom, while the tree tops upon untrodden islets flitted past in a slow, funereal procession, befitting a land of silence and death.