interminable footpath ends with a canoe, on the shores of Tanganyika. Crossing the lake, landing near some native village, he picks up the thread once more. Again he plods on and on, now on foot, now by canoe, but always keeping his line of villages, until one day suddenly he sniffs the sea-breeze again, and his faithful foot-wide guide lands him on the Atlantic seaboard. Nor is there any art in finding out these successive villages with their intercommunicating links. He _must_ find them out. A whole army of guides, servants, carriers, soldiers and camp-followers accompany him in his inarch, and this nondescript regiment must be fed. Indian corn, cassava, mawere, beans, and bananas--these do not grow wild even in Africa. Every meal has to be bought and paid for in cloth and beads; and scarcely three days can pass without a call having to be made at some village where the necessary supplies can be obtained. A caravan, as a rule, must live from hand to mouth, and its march becomes simply a regulated procession through a chain of markets. Not, however, that there are any real markets--there are neither bazaars nor stores in native Africa. Thousands of the villages through which the traveller eats his way may never have victualled a caravan before. But, with the chief's consent, which is usually easily purchased for a showy present, the villages unlock their larders, the women flock to the grinding stones, and basketfuls of food are swiftly exchanged for unknown equivalents in beads and calico.