een drafted as boys into the Matabili
regiments, and others were used as slaves, many more dwelt in the
country west and north-west of Bulawayo. Mashonaland, to the east, is
peopled by cognate tribes.]

[Footnote 48: A hut is usually allotted to each wife, and thus this
impost falls heavily on the polygamist chief, being, in fact, a tax upon
luxuries. I was told that in the Transvaal some of the richer natives
were trying to escape it by putting two wives in the same hut.]

[Footnote 49: See his book, published in the end of 1896, entitled
_Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia_. I do not gather from it how far, in
his opinion, what went on was known to the higher officials.

In a Report presented to Parliament in 1897, Sir Richard Martin states
that although there was no regulation allowing forced labour, force was,
in fact, used to bring the natives from their kraals to work, and that
the irritation thus caused did much to provoke the outbreak. The Company
in a reply which they have published do not admit this. I have no data,
other than the Report, for pronouncing an opinion on the responsibility
of the officials; but there seems to be no doubt that, both in this and
in other respects, many of the native police behaved badly, and that the
experiment of employing them, which seemed to have much to recommend it,
did in fact fail.]

[Footnote 50: The Shangani is here a very small stream. It was far away
to the north, on the lower course of the same stream, that Major Wilson
and his party perished later in the war.]

[Footnote 51: These ruins have been described in Chapter IX.]

CHAPTER XVI

FROM FORT SALISBURY TO THE SEA--MANICALAND AND THE PORTUGUESE
TERRITORIES.

In Africa, moisture is everything. It makes the difference between
fertility and barrenness; it makes the difference between a cheerful and
a melancholy landscape. As one travels north-eastward from Palapshwye to
Bulawayo, and from Bulawayo to Fort Salisbury, one passes by degrees
from an arid and almost rainless land to a land of showers and flowing
waters. In Bechuanaland there are, except for three months in the year,
no streams at all. In Matabililand one begins to find perennial brooks.
In Mashonaland there are at last rivers, sometimes with rocky banks and
clear deep pools, which (like that just mentioned) tempt one to bathe
and risk the terrible snap of a crocodile's jaws. Thus eastern
Mashonaland is far more attractive than the countries whi