as a whole, and the nearer that we drew to Gwanda the more
forcibly was this fact borne in upon me, as also was the further fact
that the Mashonas were a very powerful nation, so far at least as
numbers were concerned; for every kraal at which we arrived was bigger
and more important in every way than the one that preceded it.

The evening of the sixth day after we had crossed the Limpopo found us
outspanned upon the left bank of the stream which we had been closely
following from the moment of our passage of the river, with a lofty,
flat-topped mountain range, some fifty miles long, on our left hand,
springing from the plain close to the opposite margin of the stream, and
on our right two enormous mountains, some twenty miles apart from peak
to peak, and remarkable for their exceptional height--which I estimated
at fully fourteen thousand feet--as well as from the fact that they were
identical not only in shape, but also apparently in size and altitude.
In shape they were almost hemispherical, and to add to their similarity
each bore on its very summit a protuberance very much resembling in
appearance a beehive-shaped Kafir hut, but much larger, being probably
quite two hundred feet in height. The tops of these remarkable
mountains were covered with snow for a distance of about two thousand
feet from the summit, and very beautiful they looked, blushing a soft,
delicate pink in the last rays of the setting sun. The ground between
the two mountains--which I took to be a pair of long-extinct volcanoes--
and the range on our left rose steadily, and therefore somewhat retarded
our progress when we continued our trek on the following day; but about
two o'clock in the afternoon we reached the summit of the slope and saw
before us a valley or basin, roughly circular in shape and some twenty
miles in diameter, hemmed in on all sides by hills, some of which were
lofty enough to be snow-capped on their summits; and in the very centre
of this valley lay Gwanda, the Kraal or Place of Lomalindela, the king
of the Mashona nation.

It was an immense place, far exceeding in dimensions the biggest native
kraal that I had ever yet seen. It was circular in plan, like the other
Mashona kraals that I had passed on my way, and, also like them, it was
intersected by two main roads or streets, crossing each other at right
angles in the centre of the kraal, one road running due north and south,
while the other ran east and west. Each of th