were drawing hundreds of waggons along the track
between those towns. When, a month later, I travelled from Fort
Salisbury to Chimoyo, then the terminus of the Beira line, I passed
countless waggons standing idle along the track, because owing to the
locusts and the drought which had destroyed most of the grass, the oxen
had either died or grown too lean and feeble to be able to drag the
loads. Hence the cattle-plague which in 1896 carried off the larger part
of the transport-oxen was a terrible misfortune, not only to the
natives who owned these animals, but also to the whole northern region,
which largely depends upon cattle transport for its food, its comforts,
its building materials, and its mine machinery.

It is the character of the country that has permitted the waggon to
become so important a factor in South African exploration, politics, and
commerce. The interior, though high, is not generally rugged. Much of
it--indeed, all the eastern and northern parts--is a vast rolling plain,
across which wheeled vehicles can pass with no greater difficulty than
the beds of the streams, sometimes deeply cut through soft ground,
present. The ranges of hills which occur here and there are generally
traversed by passes, which, though stony, are not steep enough to be
impracticable. Over most of the southern half of the plateau there is no
wood, and where forests occur the trees seldom grow thick together, and
the brushwood is so dry and small that it can soon be cut away to make a
passage. Had South Africa been thickly wooded, like the eastern parts of
North America or some parts of Australia, waggon-travelling would have
been difficult or impossible; but most of it is, like the country
between the Missouri River and the Great Salt Lake, a dry open country,
where the waggon can be made a true ship of the desert. This explains
the fact, so surprising to most European readers of African travel and
adventure, that wherever man can walk or ride he can take his moving
home with him.

For rapid transit, however, the traveller who has passed beyond the
railway is now not wholly dependent on the ox. Coaches, drawn sometimes
by mules, sometimes by horses, run from some points on the railways to
outlying settlements; they are, however, always uncomfortable and not
always safe. They travel night and day, usually accomplishing from six
to eight miles an hour on good ground, but much less where the surface
is sandy or rugged. In the nor