here and there a clear streamlet trickled across
the path. Climbing to the top of one of these rocky masses, I enjoyed a
superb view to north, west, and east, over a wilderness of rugged hills,
with huge masses of grey rock rising out of a feathery forest, while to
the north the undulating line, faintly blue in the far distance, marked
the point where the plateau of central Matabililand begins to decline
toward the valley of the Zambesi. It was a beautiful prospect both in
the wild variety of the foreground and in the delicate hues of ridge
after ridge melting away towards the horizon, and it was all waste and
silent, as it has been since the world began.

The track winds through the hills for some six or eight miles before it
emerges on the more open country. These kopjes, which form a sort of
range running east-south-east and west-north-west, are the Matoppo
Hills, in which the main body of the Matabili and other insurgent
natives held their ground during the months of April, May and June,
1896. Although the wood is not dense, by no means so hard to penetrate
as the bush or low scrub which baffled the British troops in the early
Kafir wars, waged on the eastern border of Cape Colony, still the
ground is so very rough, and the tumbled masses of rock which lie round
the foot of the granite kopjes afford so many spots for hiding, that the
agile native, who knows the ground, had a far better chance against the
firearms of the white men than he could have had in the open country
where the battles of 1893 took place. Seeing such a country one can well
understand that it was quite as much by famine as by fighting that the
rising of 1896 was brought to an end.

From the northern end of the Mangwe Pass it is over forty miles to
Bulawayo, the goal of our journey, and the starting-point for our return
journey to the coast of the Indian Ocean. But Bulawayo is too important
a place to be dealt with at the end of a chapter already sufficiently
long.

[Footnote 40: "Already night saw all the stars of the other pole, and
ours brought so low that it rose not from the surface of the sea."]

[Footnote 41: Called after Constance, wife of Governor Adrian van der
Stel.]

[Footnote 42: Nimble climbers will do well to descend from the top down
a grand cleft in the rocks, very narrow and extremely steep, which is
called the Great Kloof. At its bottom, just behind Cape Town, one sees
in a stream-bed the granite rock on which the horizonta