imals. It is chiefly with the whip that the team is
driven; but if the team is one of mules, one of the two drivers is for a
large part of the time on his feet, running alongside the beasts,
beating them with a short whip and shouting to them by their names, with
such adjectives, expletives, and other objurgations as he can command.
Many Dutchmen do drive wonderfully well.

I have said nothing of internal water travel by river or lake, because
none exists. There are no lakes, and there is not a river with water
enough to float the smallest steamboat, except some reaches of the
Limpopo River in the wet season. The only steamer that plies anywhere on
a river is that which ascends the Pungwe River from Beira to
Fontesvilla; it goes only as far as the tide goes, and on most of its
trips spends fully half its time sticking on the sand-banks with which
the Pungwe abounds. So far as I know, no one has ever proposed to make a
canal in any part of the country.

From what has been said it will be gathered that there is no country
where railways are and will be more needed than South Africa. They are
the chief need of the newly settled districts, and the best means, next
to a wise and conciliatory administration, of preventing fresh native
outbreaks. Unfortunately, they will for a great while have no local
traffic, because most of the country they pass through has not one white
inhabitant to the square mile. Their function is to connect the coast
with the distant mining centres, in which population has begun to grow.
To lay them is, however, comparatively cheap work. Except in the
immediate neighbourhood of a town, nothing has to be paid for the land.
The gradients all through the interior plateau are comparatively easy,
and the engineers have in Africa cared less for making their ascents
gentle than we do in older countries. Even in the hilly parts of the
Transvaal and Matabililand the ranges are not high or steep, and one can
turn a kopje instead of cutting or tunnelling through it. Few bridges
are needed, because there are few rivers.

A word as to another point on which any one planning a tour to South
Africa may be curious--the accommodation obtainable. Most travellers
have given the inns a bad name. My own experience is scanty, for we were
so often the recipient of private hospitality as to have occasion to
sleep in an inn (apart from the "stores" of Bechuanaland and
Mashonaland, of which more hereafter) in four places onl