To describe the first stage of the route from the Cape to Cairo, that is to say, as far as the Zambesi, which I accomplished four years ago, would, if time be counted by progress, be reverting to the Middle Ages. The journey to Buluwayo, which meant four dismal days and three yet more dismal nights, in a most dismal train, whose engine occasionally went off on its own account to get a drink, and nine awful days and nine reckless nights in a Gladstone bag on wheels, labelled coach, can now be accomplished in, I believe, two and a half days in trains that rival in comfort the best efforts of our American cousins. When I think of those awful hundreds of miles through dreary wastes of sand and putrefying carcases, the seemingly impossible country that the Buluwayo road passed through, the water-courses, the hills, the waterless stages, and the final oasis, where one could buy a bottle of beer for 10s. 6d., and a cauliflower for 363., and that now men sit down to their fresh fish or pheasant for breakfast, where the old scramble daily took place for a portion of bully beef and rice; and when I think that the fish and pheasant epoch is already old history, then I know that the hand of a mighty wizard is on the country, and that yet one more name will go down to the coming ages which will loom big midst the giants that have built up an Empire such as the world has never seen. When I think, too, of my numerous friends in the country who have given their heave, some a great heave, some a little heave, yet a heave all together, and who toil on unaware of their own heroism, turning aside as a jest the vituperation of their countrymen; and when I think how I have seen the old Viking blood, long time frozen in Piccadilly and the clubs, burst forth in the old irresistible stream, then I know that it is good to be an Englishman, and a great pity fills me for those whose lives are cast in narrow ways, and who never realise the true significance of _Civis Britannicus sum_. My first experience of Africa was gained in the second Matabele war, when Rhodesia was yet young. The railway had only reached Mafeking, and my experiences were not such as to make me desire a second visit. But the spirit of the veldt was upon me, and in comfortable England these trials sank into the misty oblivion of the past, and a short twelve months after I again started for those inhospitable shores.