At Musungaikwa’s, necessity for the first time made us acquainted with red millet-meal porridge, called respectively sodza and ufa in different parts of the country. With milk and sugar it is quite palatable but gritty; the natives like it best very thick, eating it with a stick and dipping it into water before consumption; they appear almost to live upon it, and dispose of surprising quantities. Much rice is grown about here in the swampy ground, sometimes in round holes, sometimes in wide furrows, which are surprisingly straight for Kaffirs, who seem to have the greatest difficulty in producing a straight line. Their paths, though very accurate in direction, represent to the eye a long wavy line, and they are aggravatingly narrow for a European, who turns his toes out, to walk in, for the Kaffirs always go in single file, and always put their feet down straight. The natives about here followed us with bags of bark fibre full of figs of a rich brown colour, which we purchased, and found excellent when they were not inhabited, as was generally the case, by hundreds of little ants. At about thirty miles from Fort Salisbury we reached a nest of seven or eight kraals ruled over by a chief called Kunzi. Here we elected to stay and wait for the interpreter, and as he did not join us for two days we had a pleasant time for rest and for studying the inhabitants. Kunzi, the paramount chief of this community, is a young and enterprising individual; he corresponds to the nouveau riche of Kaffirdom, being spoken of as ‘a chief of the assegai’ in contradistinction to the old hereditary chiefs around. He came originally from ’Mtigeza’s country, got together a band of followers, and won for himself with his assegai the territory he now occupies. To a chief of this description all the youth and prowess of the country flock, hence he had a remarkably fine set of followers, and these he rules with marvellous strictness. We had an example of his power, for we wanted to get bearers from him. He brought the men in person, and would not allow them to go with us until we had paid the stipulated quantity of cloth in advance and deposited it with him. This arrangement did not please me at all, knowing well the tendency paid bearers have to run away, but it was inevitable. The men served us extremely well, accompanied us for a fortnight until we reached the spot arranged upon with the chief, and when I offered them more to go farther they refused, saying that they dare not do so without the consent of their chief. Kunzi is an ambitious man, and talks of becoming king of Mashonaland, but as he was driven back during his last attack on his neighbour Mangwendi, and as the Chartered Company may have something to say to it, this eventuality seems at present in the dim future. Kunzi is, however, a man of promise, and if he had been born a little earlier he might have been in a position to resuscitate the fallen glories of the race.