So we played the pretty and seductive game of resemblances. Here in this fierce African landscape we contrived to see Bratlandsdal, here Sundal, here the smoothened rock-faces of Naerodalsosen. Lower down where a vast amphitheatre of hills guarded the meeting of two waters we saw the Pyrenees. But the while I was hugging to myself a secret study of which my comrade recked nothing. Even as a man may travel by train, and mark a country, and consider within himself how he would ride over it to hounds;—so was I noting the pools and streams of the river, muddy as a glacier-fed river may be in a hot July, and judging where the fish would be like to lie, and how I should put the fly to them. A very pretty pastime, but clouded by the knowledge that no fish that is a fish, not even a wee trout, may live in these waters. They contain calcareous salts, or something unpleasant, which no fish of the royal race will stand. There are hopes of acclimatizing tench; but who can wax warm at the prospect? Yet was this to look upon a real river, the finest river (with all respect to the Nile and the Zambesi; I speak as an angler) that I have seen in Africa; a fair succession of pool and stream,—of pools running swiftly beneath steep banks and shelving shores, of streams just steep enough to make the pools holding. The pity of it! From end to end Africa has an air of being unfinished and ill-designed; there is always something wanting to its completeness; in some ways it is too big, in others too small; it lacks water, or it has too much; and things are seldom what they seem,—when you descry a distant lake it is generally the mirage; wherefore a salmon river without salmon falls quite within the natural order of African things. So on through the broadening valley, with glimpses of azure sea ahead, and soaring mountains, clad with primeval forest, all around. The road, well engineered,—that goes without saying,—is much cut up by the heavy traffic to and from certain mining enterprises in the hills. One iron-ore mine,—the property of an English company, I hear with national pride,—on the opposite side of the valley has a little railway and a little port of its own; and two vessels, hovering suspiciously in the offing, are not corsairs, but intent on a lawful freight. But here, as everywhere, the authorities are busy in making the road smooth for the motor-car, and the repairers and a steam-roller are at work. The car is not yet a familiar object to man and beast. A mule bearing a native bolts at our approach, and unseats its rider. We call to the chauffeur to stop. He replies, “Mais, ce n’est qu’un Khabyle”; in which I recognize a common colonial note. We look round to see the mule caught and the rider up again, and go on happily.