Mapanda’s is, indeed, a sorry place: not a tree to give one shade, only a store or two, built of that unsightly corrugated iron so much beloved by the early colonists of South Africa, and a few daub huts. It is a paradise only for those who arrive weary and worn from the interior, and for the sportsman, affording him a pied-à-terre in the very midst of the land where ‘the deer and the antelope roam.’ It has, however, certain points on which it justly prides itself. Firstly, it is the only spot for miles around which is not under water when the floods are out, for the banks of the Pungwe are fairly high here. Secondly, the river is navigable up to here for small steamers, even in the driest season; and, uninviting though it is at present, Mapanda may have a future before it. We had three days to wait at Mapanda’s before the little steamer Agnes would come up to take us away, and these three days were not without their excitements. Three lions penetrated one night into the heart of the camp, and partially consumed three donkeys—not ours, we are thankful to say, but those of a wicked Polish Jew, who had given infinite trouble to the English there, by causing an innocent Briton to be arrested by the Portuguese on a charge of theft; on which account he (the Jew) was well ducked in the Pungwe, and no one was sorry when the discriminating lions chose his donkeys for their meal; nay, many expressed a wish that the owner himself had formed part of the banquet. The next night the three lions, which had been lurking during the day in the jungle by the river, came to visit us again, with a view to demolishing what they and the vultures had left of the Hebrew’s donkeys. One of the three visitors was shot, but he got away, and we heard no more of them. Opposite the British colony at Mapanda is a large island forty miles long by twenty at its widest; this island is formed by the Pungwe and a branch of the same known by the Kaffir name of Dingwe-Dingwe. The island is perfectly flat, covered with low brushwood here and there, and long grass. It abounds in game; and on it the chief Mapanda has his kraal, having removed thither when the English came to settle at his old one on the banks of the river. One day we devoted to visiting this kraal, performing part of the journey in a native canoe which we borrowed—just the hollow stem of a large tree—which oscillated so much under our inexperienced hands that we momentarily expected it to upset and hand us over to the crocodiles; so we effected a hasty landing in the swampy jungle and proceeded on foot.