ours the cold chicken.
We spent weary hours in trying to get them out of our food-boxes, being
unable to fall in with the local view that they ought to be eaten with
the meat they swarm over, as a sort of relish to it. There is also the
large reddish-black ant, which bites fiercely, but is regarded with
favour because it kills the white ants when it can get at them. But the
white ant is by far the most pernicious kind, and a real curse to the
country.

At the end of 1896, when the construction of the Beira railway from
Chimoyo to Fort Salisbury began to be energetically prosecuted, it was
found that to take the line past Mtali would involve a detour of some
miles and a heavy gradient in crossing a ridge at the Christmas Pass.
Mr. Rhodes promptly determined, instead of bringing the railway to the
town, to bring the town to the railway. Liberal compensation was
accordingly paid to all those who had built houses at old Mtali, and new
Mtali was in 1897 founded on a carefully selected site seven miles away.

In 1895 there were about one hundred Europeans in the town of Mtali,
all, except the Company's officials and the storekeepers, engaged in
prospecting for or beginning to work gold-mines; for this is the centre
of one of the first-explored gold districts, and sanguine hopes have
been entertained of its reefs. We drove out to see some of the most
promising in the Penha Longa Valley, six miles to the eastward. Here
three sets of galleries have been cut, and the extraction of the metal
was said to be ready to begin if the machinery could be brought up from
the coast. As to the value and prospects of the reefs, over which I was
most courteously shown by the gentlemen directing the operations, I
could of course form no opinion. They are quartz-reefs, occurring in
talcose and chloritic schistose rocks, and some of them maintain their
direction for many miles. There is no better place than this valley[53]
for examining the ancient gold-workings, for here they are of great
size. Huge masses of alluvial soil in the bottom of the valley had
evidently been turned over, and indeed a few labourers were still at
work upon these. But there had also been extensive open cuttings all
along the principal reefs, the traces of which are visible in the deep
trenches following the line of the reefs up and down the slopes of the
hills, and in the masses of rubbish thrown out beside them. Some of
these cuttings are evidently recent, for the side