wye (nearly four hundred from Mafeking), gold
reefs have been worked at intervals for five and twenty years, under a
concession originally granted (1869), by Lo Bengula, and a little
European settlement has grown up. Here one passes from Bechuanaland into
the territories which belonged to the Matabili, and now to the British
South Africa Company. The country rises and grows more picturesque. The
grass is greener on the pastures. New trees appear, some of them bearing
beautiful flowers, and the air is full of tales of lions. For, in
Africa, where there is more grass there is more game, and where there is
more game there are more beasts of prey. Lions, we were told, had last
week dragged a Kafir from beneath a waggon where he was sleeping. Lions
had been seen yester eve trotting before the coach. Lions would probably
be seen again to-morrow. But to us the beast was always a lion of
yesterday or a lion of to-morrow, never a lion of to-day. The most
direct evidence we had of his presence was when, some days later, we
were shown a horse on which that morning a lion had sprung, inflicting
terrible wounds. The rider was not touched, and galloped the poor animal
back to camp. At Mangwe, a pretty little station with exceptionally bad
sleeping quarters, the romantic part of the country may be said to
begin. All round there are rocky kopjes, and the track which leads
northward follows a line of hollows between them, called the Mangwe
Pass, a point which was of much strategical importance in the Matabili
war of 1893, and became again of so much importance in the recent native
rising (1896) that one of the first acts of the British authorities was
to construct a rough fort in it and place a garrison there. Oddly
enough, the insurgents did not try to occupy it, and thereby cut off the
English in Matabililand from their railway base at Mafeking, the reason
being, as I was informed, that the _Molimo_, or prophet, whose
incitements contributed to the insurrection, had told them that it was
by the road through this pass that the white strangers would quit the
country for ever.

A more peaceful spot could not be imagined than the pass was when we
passed through it at 5 A.M., "under the opening eyelids of the dawn."
Smooth green lawns, each surrounded by a fringe of wood, and filled with
the songs of awakening birds, lay beneath the beetling crags of
granite,--granite whose natural grey was hidden by brilliant red and
yellow lichens,--and