Beyond Chimoia’s the streams grow more sluggish, and emit more fœtid odours, suggestive of fevers. Ragged-leaved bananas, bamboos, and tree-ferns luxuriate in all these streams, which work their way in deep channels, or dongas, across the level country. The fall is now scarcely perceptible, and the long flat belt which girdles Africa is entered, the much-dreaded low veldt, teeming with swamps, game, and tsetse-fly. At one time you are walking through a forest of bamboos, making graceful arches overhead with their long canes, and recalling pictures of Japan; at another time you go through palm forests, and then comes a stretch of burning open country; and at night-time, for the first time, we heard the lions roar. We lighted huge camp-fires and trembled for the safety of our eleven donkeys, for which animals lions are supposed to have a particular predilection. Mandigo’s kraal is twenty-four miles from Chimoia’s, and to us was equally uninteresting and equally unproductive of the much-needed supplies. Some say the fly only begins here, and certainly we saw none ourselves till after Mandigo’s; and from here to Sarmento we saw plenty of it. The tsetse-fly is grey, about the size of an ordinary horse-fly, with overlapping wings. Our donkeys, poor things, got many bites, and we felt grieved at their prospective deaths. We provided them with the only remedy of which we could hear, namely, a handful of salt every night; but how this is supposed to act in counter-acting the bite of the fly I am at a loss to imagine. Certainly this fly has many peculiarities. All domesticated quadrupeds—horses, oxen, and dogs—die from it when brought up country; whereas zebras, buffaloes, and native curs flourish amongst it with impunity, and its bite has not so much effect upon human beings as that of a common midge. Ample evidence of the ravages of this venomous insect are visible on the roadside. Dozens of waggons lie rotting in the veldt, bearing melancholy testimony to the failure of Messrs. Heany and Johnson’s pioneer scheme. Everywhere lie the bleaching bones of the oxen which dragged them; and at Mandigo’s is an abandoned hut filled to overflowing with the skins of these animals, awaiting the further development of the Pungwe traffic to be converted into ropes, or reims, as they are usually termed in South Africa. Fully 2,000l. worth of waggons, we calculated, as we passed by on one day’s march, lies in the veldt, ghostlike, as after a battle. Then there are Scotch carts of more or less value, and a handsome Cape cart, which Mr. Rhodes had to abandon on his way up to Mashonaland, containing in the box seat a bottle labelled ‘Anti-fly mixture,’ a parody on the situation.