take us many weeks, and would lead us through much country hitherto unexplored, so that ample preparations and a careful adjustment of our belongings were necessary. The best interpreter to be had was kindly placed at our disposal by the Chartered Company, as the language in those parts differs essentially from that spoken at Zimbabwe and the Sabi, a certain portion of which had by this time penetrated into our brains. The interpreter in question was just then absent from Fort Salisbury, so to occupy our time we decided on a trip to the Mazoe Valley, and the old gold workings which exist there. Having despatched three donkeys with bedding and provisions the night before, we left Fort Salisbury one lovely morning, September 15, and rode through country as uninteresting as one could well imagine until we reached Mount Hampden. Somehow or another we had formed impressions of this mountain of a wholly erroneous character. It has an historic interest as a landmark, named after one of the first explorers of Mashonaland, but beyond this it is miserably disappointing. Instead of the fine mountain which our imaginations had painted for us, we saw only a miserable round elevation above the surrounding plain, which might possibly be as high as Box Hill, certainly no higher. It is covered with trees of stunted growth; it is absolutely featureless; and is alone interesting from its isolation, and the vast area of flat veldt which its summit commands. Soon after leaving Mount Hampden the views grew very much finer, and as we descended into the valley of the Tatagora, a tributary of the Mazoe, we entered into a distinctly new class of scenery. Here everything is rich and green; the rounded hills and wooded heights were an immense relief to us after the continuous though fantastic granite kopjes which we had travelled amongst during the whole of our sojourn in Mashonaland. The delicate green leaves of the machabel tree, on which, I am told, elephants delight to feed, were just now at their best, and take the place of the mimosa, mapani, and other trees, of which we had grown somewhat weary. The soil, too, is here of a reddish colour, and we enjoyed all the pleasurable sensations of getting into an entirely new formation, after the eye had been accustomed to one style of colouring for months. As we proceeded down the valley the hills closed in and became higher; occasional rugged peaks stood up out of gentle wooded slopes; and if one had ignored the trivial detail of foliage, one might have imagined that we were plunging into a pretty Norwegian valley with a stream rushing down its midst.