losed. The Union
of South Africa, as you have seen, has taken over German South-West
Africa; Great Britain has assumed the control of all German East Africa
with the exception of Ruanda and Urundu, which have become part of the
Belgian Congo. Togoland is divided between France and Britain, while the
greater part of The Cameroons is merged into the Lower French West
African possessions of which the French Congo is the principal one.
Britain gets the Cameroon Mountains.

The one-time Dark Continent remains dark only for Germany.

[Illustration: _Photograph Copyright British South Africa Co._

VICTORIA FALLS]

CHAPTER III--RHODES AND RHODESIA

I

For fifty-eight hours the train from Johannesburg had travelled steadily
northward, past Mafeking and on through the apparently endless stretches
of Bechuanaland. Alternately frozen and baked, I had swallowed enough
dust to stock a small-sized desert. Dawn of the third day broke and with
it came a sharp rap on my compartment door. I had been dreaming of a
warm bath and a joltless life when I was rudely restored to reality. The
car was stationary and a blanketed Matabele, his teeth chattering with
the cold, peered in at the window.

"What is it?" I asked.

"You are in Rhodesia and I want to know who you are," boomed a voice out
in the corridor.

I opened the door and a tall, rangy, bronzed man--the immigration
inspector--stepped inside. He looked like a cross between an Arizona
cowboy and an Australian overseas soldier. When I proved to his
satisfaction that I was neither Bolshevik nor Boche he departed with the
remark: "We've got to keep a watch on the people who come into this
country."

Such was my introduction to Rhodesia, where the limousine and the
ox-team compete for right of way on the veldt and the 'rickshaw yields
to the motor-cycle in the town streets. Nowhere in the world can you
find a region that combines to such vivid and picturesque extent the
romance and hardship of the pioneer age with the push and practicality
of today. Here existed the "King Solomon's Mines" of Rider Haggard's
fancy: here the modern gold-seekers of fact sought the treasures of
Ophir; here Nature gives an awesome manifestation of her power in the
Victoria Falls.

It is the only country where a great business corporation rules, not by
might of money but by chartered authority. Linked with that rule is the
story of a conflict between share-holder and settler that is unique in