From Kanye I was driven in the Chief’s cart to the railway at Lobatsi, whence on the following day I was escorted by the native ordained minister, Roger K. Mokadi, to his station at Maanwane, over the Transvaal border. After a service in the Church and a visit to Roger’s kraal, a hot tramp under a fierce sun brought us at Mabotsa to the ruins of the old Mission house built by Livingstone and Edwards. Some of the walls were standing seven or eight feet high, but the interior was overgrown with bush. Close by is the hill where Livingstone had his famous encounter with the lion, and near at hand an old native Christian lives who was with Livingstone at the time. A drive through Linokani, where the German Lutherans are carrying on a fine piece of missionary work, brought me to Zeerust and next day by means of the train I reached Johannesburg. It does not fall within the scope of this book to describe this wonderful city, the creation of the last twenty-five years. It is by far the largest business town in South Africa and is the centre of the greatest gold producing mines in the world. Here I experienced the utmost kindness from members of the Congregational Church and met my colleague, Mr. Houghton, with whom I was to travel for the next nine months. Nor must I stay to refer to a deeply interesting visit to Pretoria. At these great centres the evidence of the appalling racial conflict, which constitutes the greatest problem confronting the Christian Church in South Africa to-day, was abundantly apparent. A few days later I travelled to Mafeking, for ever immortalised for its heroic defence during the Boer war, to see Colonel Panzera, the Resident Commissioner for the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and thence proceeded to Tiger Kloof to meet all the Society’s South African missionaries for consultation upon the work and its problems. Throughout my journeys amongst the Churches in Bechuanaland and Matebeleland there were many signs of the growing power and promise of the Native South African Church. That Church, planted first by Moffat and his colleagues at Kuruman, and carried north by Livingstone and his successors until it has well-nigh reached the Zambesi, has had a chequered career, but its progress has been unmistakably onward and upward. It has been tried and purified by the struggles of the past, and to-day its “far-flung battle line” is making a steady advance against the forces of superstition and heathenism with which it is confronted. “Climbing through darkness up to God,” the members of that Church are bravely carrying “the wonder and the glory of the light” into “the darkness and the sorrow of the night” in which so many of their fellow-countrymen are still enshrouded. Through the open doors “the true Light, which lighteth every man coming into the world,” is pouring its ever-brightening rays. CHAPTER III Tiger Kloof--“A Lamp Shining in a Dark Place”