The country beyond the Lundi is thickly populated, with native villages perched on rocky heights, many of which we saw as we wended our slow way through the Naka pass. One hill is inhabited by a tribe of human beings, the next by a tribe of baboons, and I must say these aborigines of the country on the face of it seem more closely allied to one another than they are to the race of white men, who are now appropriating the territory of both. The natives, living as they do in their hill-set villages on the top of the granite kopjes, are nimble as goats, cowardly yet friendly to the white stranger. They are constantly engaged in intertribal wars, stealing each other’s women and cattle when opportunity occurs, and never dreaming of uniting against the common enemy, the Zulu, during whose periodical raids they perch themselves on the top of their inaccessible rocks, and look down complacently on the burning of their huts, the pillaging of their granaries, and the appropriation of their cattle. Under the thick jungle of trees by the roadside as we passed along we saw many acres under cultivation for the produce of sweet potatoes, beans, and the ground or monkey nut (Arachis). They make long neat furrows with their hoes beneath the trees, the shade of which is necessary for their crops. They are an essentially industrious race, far more so than the Kaffirs of our South African colonies. Here the men work in the fields, leaving the women to make pots, build granaries, and carry water. In the Colony women are the chief agriculturists. We spent a long and pleasant day within a few yards of another village called M’lala in Chibi’s country, also perched on a rocky eminence, where many objects of interest came before our notice. Here for the first time we saw the iron furnaces in which the natives smelt the iron ore they obtain from the neighbouring mountains. This is a time-honoured industry in Mashonaland. Dos Santos alludes to it in his description, and so do Arab writers of the ninth and tenth centuries, as practised by the savages of their day. [3] In Chibi’s country iron-smelting is a great industry. Here whole villages devote all their time and energies to it, tilling no land and keeping no cattle, but exchanging their iron-headed assegais, barbed arrow-heads, and field tools for grain and such domestic commodities as they may require. I am told also of villages which, after the same fashion, have a monopoly of pot-making. This industry is mostly carried on by the women, who deftly build up with clay, on round stands made for the purpose, large pots for domestic use, which they scrape smooth with large shells kept for this object, and then they give them a sort of black glaze with plumbago. In exchange for one of these pots they get as much grain as it will hold.