northern express. Vine said that the Victoria
Falls were all right, but that their surroundings were, many of
them, perversely wrong. It was so very stale, the hotel business,
with the moonlight river excursions and the Livingstone trips,
far too much sleeked and smoothed by foresight, and tamed by
taking of thought. If one had only traveled up with pack donkeys,
provisioned with leathery meat and leathery damper! For Vine had
known better times in Africa. He had known pioneer adventures in
his headstrong youth but had fallen out of his Column after three
crowded months. Tempted of fever, he had made a great refusal.
And now in this year, twenty-four years after, the sense of
having seen better days at a tithe of the expense, oppressed him.

However, the tickets had been taken, and the splendidly null
organization of their party had him in its grip. He went back
from the Falls to Bulawayo, and was whisked out to Khami. Only an
hour was allowed him to see the river. At the grave of the
Matopos, he was allowed two hours. There a brooding Presence
grappled with the languors of his pilgrimage. The demoniac
discontent of that savage scene made great play with him, during
the two hours he was there, but two hours are not a very long
time. Soon they were scorching back again with an interval for
tea at a well (or ill) appointed hotel. Vine was disposed to give
up the dreary pilgrimage-game that very night, he told me. But
the born organizer, coming to him after dinner, persuaded him to
play it out. He offered to release him after the next lap the lap
of Great Zimbabwe. When that was once finished to time, he
proposed that the party should have a breather, a short spell of
civilized life at Salisbury, should it so seem good to them. Vine
could be spared for the space of that interlude. Afterwards he
would doubtless take boat with them for a cruise up the East
Coast. He would be sufficiently reinvigorated to rough it out
with them rigorously to the end. The East Coast route might not
entail quite so many hardships. Vine sighed, but he was a man of
his word. He went to Zimbabwe without a murmur. He had longed for
seventy-five miles of the dusty Umvuma post-cart, but alas, the
day was the third of the new month! The railway extension to
Victoria had been opened on the first. The organizer rubbed his
hands as he told them the glad news: 'We can have a dining-car
and sleeping berths now to within sixteen miles odd of the ruins.