d to prospect,
though, according to all accounts, Symes had been murdered by the
Matabele before they reached the Guai river.

For the next month we trekked steadily northwards, having very fair
sport; but, as I expected, extracting no information whatever from the
natives about the two prospectors who had passed that way years before.
At length, Jack became more or less reconciled to failure, and realising
the futility of further search suggested a return to Bulawayo. As our
donkey caravan was beginning to suffer severely from the fly, I
concurred, and we started to travel slowly back to Bulawayo, shooting by
the way.

One night after a particularly hard trek we inspanned at an old _kraal_,
the painted walls of which told that at one time it had served as a
royal residence, and as I had shot an eland cow that afternoon, which
provided far more meat than we could consume, we invited the induna and
his tribe to the feast. Not to be outdone in hospitality, the old chief
produced the kaffir beer of the country, a liquid which has nothing to
recommend it beyond the fact that it intoxicates rapidly.

A meat feast and a beer drink is a great event in the average kaffir's
life, and as the evening wore on a general jollification started to the
thump of tomtoms and the squeak of kaffir fiddles. There was one very
drunk old Barotse, who sat close to me, and, accompanying himself with
thumps on his tomtom, sang in one droning key a song about a man who
kept snakes and lions inside him, and from whose chest the evil eye
looked out. At least, so far as I could gather that was roughly the gist
of the song; but as his tomtom was particularly large and most obnoxious
I politely took it away from him, and Jack and I used it as a table for
our gourds of kaffir beer, which we were pretending to consume in large
quantities.

A gourd, however, is a top-heavy sort of drinking vessel, and in a very
short time I had succeeded in spilling half a pint or so of my drink on
the parchment of the drum. Not wishing to spoil the old gentleman's
plaything, which he evidently valued above all things, I mopped up the
beer with my handkerchief, and in doing so removed from the parchment a
portion of the accumulated filth of ages.

"Hullo!" said Jack, taking the instrument from me and holding it up to
the firelight. "There's a picture of some sort here. It looks like a man
in a cocked hat."

He rubbed it hard with his pocket handkerchief, and the po