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 march, 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
traveler eats his way may never have victualed a caravan before. But
with the chief's consent, which is usually easily purchased for a
showy present, the villagers unlock their larders, the women flock to
the grinding-stones, and basketfuls of food are swiftly exchanged for
unknown equivalents in beads and calico.

The native tracks which I have just described are the same in
character all over Africa. They are veritable foot-paths, never over a
foot in breadth, beaten as hard as adamant, and rutted beneath the
level of the forest bed by centuries of native traffic. As a rule
these foot-paths are marvelously direct. Like the roads of the old
Romans, they run straight on through everything, ridge and mountain
and valley, never shying at obstacles, nor anywhere turning aside to
breathe. Yet within this general straightforwardness there is a
singular eccentricity and indirectness in detail. Although the African
foot-path is on the whole a bee-line, no fifty yards of it are ever
straight. And the reason is not far to seek. If a stone is
encountered, no native will ever think of removing it. Why should he?
It is easier to walk round it. The next man who comes that way will do
the same. He knows that a hundred men are following him; he looks at
the stone; a moment, and it might be unearthed and tossed aside, but
no--he also holds on his way. It is not that he resents the trouble,
it is the idea that is wanting. It would no more occur to him that
that stone was a displaceable object, and that for the general weal he
might displace it, than that its feldspar was of the orthoclase
v