The
want of a waggon makes camping out much more troublesome and involves a
large force of native porters. Thus elaborate preparations are needed,
and though the distance, as the crow flies, from Bulawayo to the Falls
is only some two hundred miles, at least six weeks are needed for the
trip, a space of time we could not spare.

I have described in the last chapter the route from Cape Town to the
capital of Matabililand which persons coming from England would
naturally take. It is not, however, by any means the shortest route to
the sea, and is therefore not the route along which the bulk of the
European trade is likely in future to pass. From Cape Town to Bulawayo
it is fourteen hundred miles; but from Bulawayo to the port of Beira, on
the Indian Ocean, it is only six hundred and fifty miles _via_ Fort
Salisbury and Mtali, and will be only about five hundred if a more
direct railway line should ever be laid out. I propose to take the
reader back to the sea at Beira by this Fort Salisbury and Mtali route,
and in following it he will learn something about Mashonaland and the
mountains which divide British from Portuguese territory.

Bulawayo is distant from Fort Salisbury two hundred and eighty miles.
The journey takes by coach four days and four nights, travelling night
and day, with only short halts for meals. An ox-waggon accomplishes it
in about three weeks. The track runs nearly all the way along high
ground, open, breezy, and healthful, because dry, but seldom
picturesque. It is a land of rolling downs, the tops of which are
covered with thin grass, while better pastures, and sometimes woods
also, are found in the valleys of the streams and on the lower slopes of
the hills. The first part of the way, from Bulawayo to the little town
of Gwelo, is rather dull. One crosses the Bimbezi River, where the
Matabili were finally overthrown in the war of 1893, and the
Shangani[50] River, where they suffered their first defeat. The
Company's force was advancing along the high open ground to attack
Bulawayo, and the native army met them on the road. Both battlefields
are bare and open, and one wonders at the folly of the natives who
advanced over such ground, exposed to the rifle-fire and the still more
deadly Maxim guns of the invaders. Armed in large part only with
assagais, they were mown down before they could even reach the front of
the British line, and their splendid courage made their destruction all
the more complet