siwa"), the head of a tribe of Barolongs. We were taken to see him,
and found him sitting on a low chair under a tree in the midst of his
huge native village, dressed in a red flannel shirt, a pair of corduroy
trousers, and a broad grey felt hat with a jackal's tail stuck in it for
ornament. His short woolly hair was white, and his chocolate-coloured
skin, hard and tough like that of a rhinoceros, was covered with a
fretwork of tiny wrinkles, such as one seldom sees on a European face.
He was proud of his great age (eighty-five), and recalled the names of
several British governors and generals during the last seventy years.
But his chief interest was in inquiries (through his interpreter)
regarding the Queen and events in England, and he amused his visitors by
the diplomatic shrewdness with which, on being told that there had been
a change of government in England, and a majority in favour of the new
government, he observed "They have made a mistake; they could not have
had a better government than the old one." He was a wealthy man, owning
an immense number of the oxen which then carried on (for the cattle
plague soon after destroyed most of them) the transport service between
Mafeking and Bulawayo; and, from all I could learn, he ruled his people
well, following the counsels of the British government, which in 1885
delivered him out of the hands of the Boers. He died in the middle of
1896.

At Mafeking we bade farewell to the railway, and prepared to plunge into
the wilderness. We travelled in a light American waggon, having a Cape
Dutchman as driver and a coloured "Cape boy" to help him, but no other
attendants. The waggon had a small iron tank, which we filled with water
that had been boiled to kill noxious germs, and with this we made our
soup and tea. For provisions we carried biscuits, a little tinned soup
and meat, and a few bottles of soda-water. These last proved to be the
most useful part of our stores, for we found the stream-or well-water
along the route undrinkable, and our mouths were often so parched that
it was only by the help of sips of soda-water that we could manage to
swallow the dry food. At the European stores which occur along the road,
usually at intervals of thirty or forty miles, though sometimes there is
none for sixty miles or more, we could often procure eggs and sometimes
a lean chicken; so there was enough to support life, though seldom did
we get what is called in America "a square meal.