The expense of an expedition entirely depends on the number of sportsmen forming the party, and on their individual requirements, some men being more luxurious than others. Roughly speaking a caravan of fifty porters, five askaris, and a headman will cost 65_l._ a month, and this will include cost of trade-goods to buy food. It does not, however, include interpreters, cook, tent-boy, or gun-bearers, whose wages vary according to their qualifications; neither does it include arms and ammunition for the men. Interpreters receive the same food allowance (‘posho’) as headmen; cooks and tent-boys the same as askaris. If two or more sportsmen go out together, their individual expenses would be a little less than if they had gone alone. There are very few places, however, where four men can comfortably shoot from the same camp without interfering with each other’s sport, although it can be managed by three. If a party is made up of four guns, I should recommend them to divide, on arriving at their headquarters, and shoot in different localities from two camps. CHAPTER XVII THE LION IN SOUTH AFRICA BY F. C. SELOUS In those districts of Southern Africa made historic by the stirring narratives of Sir Cornwallis Harris and Gordon Cumming, where but half a century ago every species of wild game native to that part of the world, from the ponderous elephant to the graceful springbuck, was to be met with in such surprising numbers that vast tracts of country assumed the appearance of huge zoological gardens, one may now travel for days without seeing a single wild animal. In British Bechuanaland the elephant and the rhinoceros are as extinct as the mammoth in England, and the myriads of zebras and antelopes which Sir Cornwallis Harris saw daily scouring the plains in commingled herds are now only represented by a few scattered hartebeests, blesbucks, and gemsbucks, which still exist in the country bordering on the Kalahari desert. The high veldt of the Transvaal too, once black with innumerable herds of wildebeests, blesbucks, and springbucks, is at the present day for the sportsman or the naturalist a dreary waste, more devoid of animal life probably than any other sparsely populated country in the world. With the antelopes and buffaloes the beasts of prey have disappeared too, and in many districts where fifty years ago the magnificent music of the lion’s roar was the traveller’s constant lullaby, no sound now disturbs the silence of the night, except indeed the ceaseless rattle of the quartz-crushing machinery in the mining districts. [Illustration: A GROUP OF SOUTH AFRICAN ANTELOPES]