On leaving Fort Victoria we followed the Chartered Company’s road for forty miles northwards with our waggons to Makori post station. One day we were encamped near the two large villages of Umfanipatza and Sibibabira built on two rocks, but now, with the confidence inspired by the presence of the Chartered Company, the inhabitants are beginning to build huts on the flat space around. We paid a visit to them both, and admired the tall euphorbia which grew in them and the rich entanglement of begonia and other creepers then in flower. In one hut we found a man weaving a bark blanket very neatly with no loom, only platting it with his fingers. It was done with a kind of pink twine made of some bark. At Makori post station, under the shade of wide-spreading trees, and in close proximity to some fantastic granite rocks, which rose like gigantic menhirs out of the plain and were covered with an almost scarlet lichen, we passed several busy days, preparing cruppers, girths, and breast-bands for our seven pack-donkeys; bags for our coffee, sugar, and tea; cobbling our boots and overhauling our clothes, and nursing four fever patients, for there had been two days of chilly drizzling rain, the inevitable result of which was fever for some of our party. The post station lay about one mile from our camping-ground; the two huts where the B.S.A. men lived were situated on a rocky kopje full of caves, in one of which their horse was stabled, and from the top of the rock an extensive view was gained over the high plateau, well wooded just here and studded with rocks of fantastic shape. Here and there thick volumes of smoke rose from the grass fires common all over the country at this season of the year, which looked for all the world like distant manufacturing towns, and suggested the comparison of a view from a spur of the Derbyshire hills over the plain of Cheshire, with Stockport, Manchester, and other centres of industry belching forth their dense volumes of smoke.