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and the melancholy aspect of affairs was enhanced by the hundred and fifty saddles placed in rows within the fort, which had once belonged to the hundred and fifty horses brought up by the pioneers, all of which had died of horse-sickness.

From Fort Victoria our real troubles of progression began. It is only fourteen miles from there to Zimbabwe ruins by the narrow Kaffir path, and active individuals have been known to go there and back in a day. It took us exactly seven days to traverse this distance with our wagons. The cutting down of trees, the skirting of swamps, the making of corduroy bridges, were amongst the hindrances which impeded our progress. For our men it was a perpetual time of toil, for us it was a week of excessive weariness.

By diving into the forests and climbing hills we came across groups of natives who interested us. It was the season just then in which they frequent the forests the "barking season," when they go forth to collect large quantities of the bark of certain trees, out of which they produce so much that is useful for their primitive lives. They weave textiles out of bark, they make bags and string out of bark, they make quivers for their arrows, beehives for their bees, and sometimes granaries out of bark; in fact, the bark industry is second only to the iron smelting amongst the Makalangas.

watch the fire to keep off wild beasts, and then when morning comes they pack their belongings, their treasures of bark, mice, and caterpillars, and start off along the narrow path in single file at a tremendous pace, silent for a while, and then bursting forth into song, looking for all the world like a procession of black caterpillarsthemselves.

These forests around Zimbabwe are lovely to wander in, with feathery festoons of lichen, like a fairy scene at a pantomime; outside the forests are long stretches of coarse grass, towering above our heads in many cases, which were just then in seed, and like our harvest-fields at home. Fine trees, perched on the summit of colossal anthills, cast a pleasant shade around, and if by chance we were near a stream we had to be careful not to fall into the game-pits, deep, narrow holes hidden by the grass, dug in the ground, into which the natives drive the deer and antelope, so that they get their fore legs fixed in them and cannot get out. All around here is far too well watered to be pleasant; long: stretches of unhealthy swamps fill up the valleys, rivers and streams are plentiful,. and the vegetation consequently rich.

Our camp close to Zimbabwe ruins was for over two months a busy scene in the midst of the wilderness; there were the two wagons in which we slept; the Indian terrace, a construction of grass and sticks in which we ate, our tent being the drawing-room; and in addition to these there were the kitchen and the men's sleeping room, cleverly constructed out of the sails of our wagons with walls of grass. In the centre was an erection for our cocks and hens, but even from here the jackals occasionally contrived to steal one or two.

which latter adjunct gave a comfortable and concentrated feeling to it all.

At the correct season of the year they go off in groups into the forests to collect bark, taking with them their wives and their children, carrying with them their assegais and fine barbed arrows, with which they shoot mice, a delicacy greatly beloved by them; they take with them also bags of mealies for food, and collect bags of caterpillars, brown, hairy cater-Around the whole ran a skerm, or hedge, pillars three inches long, which at this season of the year swarm on the trees. These they disembowel and eat in enormous quantities, and what they cannot eat on the expedition they dry in the sun and take home for future consumption. Their only method of making a fire is by rubbing two sticks dexterously together until a spark appears, with which they ignite some tinder carried in a little wooden box attached to their girdles. At night time they cut down branches from the trees and make a shelter for themselves from the wind. It is curious to see a set of natives asleep, like sardines in a box, one black, naked lump of humanity; if one turns or disturbs the harmony of the pie they all get up and swear at him, and settle down again. One man is always told off to

Umgabeh is the dynastic name of the petty chief whose territory includes the Zimbabwe ruins; he recognizes the suzerainty of Chibi, but is to all intents and purposes a free ruler. He arrived on the day after our arrival to visit us and then we were introduced to the Makalanga custom of hand-clapping. The mysterious meaning attached to this hand-clapping I was afterwards able in a measure to fathom; on the arrival of a chief or grand induna the hand-clapping is a serious undertaking and has to go on incessantly until the great man is seated and bids them to stop. Umgabeh was glad to see us, he said, and had no intention of interrupting our proposed work, provided only,

we agreed to one thing, and that was to leave his women alone. As for ourselves and our white men we answered that he need have no fear, but as for our negro workmen we would not hold ourselves responsible, but suggested that as they would all be his subjects he must see to that himself.

Umgabeh is a huge fat man, tall and dignified, though naked; around his neck he has a chain of huge white Venetian beads of considerable antiquity; in his hand he carries his iron sceptre, the badge of a chief, and his battle-axe is lavishly decorated with brass wire. Amongst his men we saw many of varied types, some distinctly Arabian in features, and I am bound to say the Kaffir type amongst them was the exception and by no means the rule.

From the many villages on the heights around Zimbabwe came every day crowds of natives, bringing provisions for sale, and we held a regular market in our camp. By this means we got as many cocks and hens as we wanted, eggs, milk, honey, and sweet potatoes; then they would bring us tomatoes, the largest I have ever seen, chillies, capers, and monkey-nuts. Some of these, I am told on excellent authority, are distinct products of the New World, the seeds of which must have originally been brought by Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish traders and given in exchange for the commodities of the country; and now they form an integral part of the diet of these people and prove to us how the ends of the world were brought together long before our time.

These daily markets were times of great excitement for us, for besides giving us an insight into their ways and life, we found it an excellent time to acquire for a few beads their prettily carved knives, their snuff-boxes, their weapons, and the many quaint things they hang about their persons. As for Umgabeh himself, his chief kraal and residence was six miles away, and we saw but little of him after the first excitement of our arrival had worn off, but his brother Ikomo, the induna of the kraal on the hill behind the ruins, often came down to see us, and was a constant source of annoyance, seeing that his friendly visits had always some ulterior motive of getting something out of us. On one of these occasions my wife had collected a beautiful bowl of honey; the rascal Ikomo first eyed it with covetousness and then plunged his hand into the very midst thereof, and enjoyed his fingers complacently for some time after, whilst

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she in disgust had to throw away the best part of her treasure.

Frequently Ikomo would try to interrupt our work, and so frighten our black diggers from other villages that they ran away, and we had to collect a fresh team. On one occasion, whilst digging upon the fortress we disturbed a large rock, which slipped. On it was perched one of their granaries, which promptly fell to pieces, and the contents were scattered far and wide. In vain we offered to pay for the damages done; almost in no time we were surrounded by a screaming crowd of angry men and women, with Ikomo at their head, brandishing assegais and other terrible weapons of war. For a moment the affair looked serious; all our blacks fled in haste, and we, a small band of white men surrounded by the foe, were doubtful what course to pursue. At length we determined to stand their insults no longer, and, seizing whatever was nearest spade, pick, or shovel- we rushed at them, and forthwith Ikomo and his valiant men fled like sheep before us, clambering up rocks, chattering and screaming like a cageful of monkeys at the Zoo. Sir John Willoughby and one or two men from Fort Victoria chanced to come over that day to visit us, and on hearing of our adventure he summoned Ikomo to a palaver, and told him that if such a thing happened again his kraal would be burnt to the ground and his tribe driven from the hill; and the result of this threat was that Ikomo troubled us no more.

Ikomo's kraal occupies a lovely situation on Zimbabwe Hill, hidden amongst the rocks, from the top of which lovely views can be obtained over the distant Bessa and Inyuni ranges, on the one side over the Livouri range, over Presidential Pass on the other, and to the south over a sea of rugged kopjes leading down into the Tokwe valley. From this point the strategical value of the hill is at once grasped, rising as it does sheer out of a well-watered plain, unassailable from all sides, the most commanding view in all the country round. The village is festooned with charming creepers, begonia and others, then in full flower; rows of granaries decorate the summit, and in the midst are some of those quaint trees which they use as larders, hanging therefrom the produce of their fields neatly tied up in long grass packages, which look like fat German sausages growing from the branches.

On one of the few flat spaces in the village is kept the village drum, or "tomtom," constantly in use for dances. One

Dancing is the one great dissipation of the Makalanga's life; he will keep it up for hours without tiring at their great beer-drinking feasts, at weddings, nay, even at funerals. At these latter ceremo

day we found the women of the village hard at work enjoying themselves round this drum, dancing a sort of war-dance of their own. It was a quaint sight to see these women, with deep furrows on their naked stomachs, rushing to and fro, stoop-nies they will not allow a white man to be ing, kneeling, shouting, brandishing battle-axes and assegais, and going through all the pantomime of war, until at last one of these Amazons fell into hysterics, and the dance was over. On another occasion, whilst visiting some ruins in a lovely dale about eight miles from Zimbabwe, we were treated to another sort of dance by the women of a neighboring village. The chief feature in the performance was a grotesque one, and consisted of smacking their furrowed stomachs and long-hanging breasts in measured cadence with their feet, so that the air resounded with the noise produced.

As for the men they are forever dancing; either a beer drink, the new moon, or simple, unfeigned joviality being the motive power. Frequently on cold evenings our men would dance round the camp-fire; always the same Indumba, or war-dance; round and round they went shouting, capering, gesticulating. Now and again scouts would be sent out to reconnoitre, and would engage in fight with an imaginary foe, and return victorious to the circle. If one had not had personal experience of their cowardice, one might almost have been alarmed at their hostile attitudes. On pay-day, when our thirty workmen each received a blanket for their month's work, they treated us to a dance, each man wrapped in his new acquisition. Umgabeh, with his sceptre and battle-axe, conducted the proceedings; it was a most energetic and ridiculous looking scene to witness, as the blankets whirled round in the air, and the men shouted and yelled with joy. When all was over, each man measured his blanket with his neighbor, to see that he had not been cheated, and, gaily chattering, they wended their way to the village, with their blankets trailing behind them. The novelty of possessing a blanket was an intense joy to these savages. For a whole month they worked and found themselves in everything for an article which cost 45. 1od. at Fort Tuli, and probably 25. 6d. in England. One tottering old man was amongst our workmen, and seeing his incapacity I was about to discard him, but his longing for a blanket was so piteous "to sleep in a blanket once before he died". that he was allowed to continue and do his best to earn one.

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present, so what they do is still a mystery, but we heard repeatedly the incident festivities after a death had taken place, the shouting, the dancing, and the hideous din of the tom-tom. In our work at Zimbabwe, we unwittingly opened several of their graves, in which the corpse was laid on a reed mat-the mat, probably, on which he had slept during life-his bowl and his calabash were placed beside him; and in the tomb of a chief it is customary to place a bowl of beer, which is constantly replenished for the refreshment of the spirit, for they are great believers in making themselves agreeable to the departed, and at the annual sacrificial feast in honor of the dead, meat and beer are always allotted to the spirits of their ancestors.

There is a good deal of music inherent in the Makalanga; he makes his piano with thirty or more iron notes, this he puts into a calabash and plays most dexterously; he also plays a sort of Jew's harp made out of a reed and string; he has his cymbals and his drum, anything to make a noise; at his dances he ties to his person reeds or gourds filled with the seeds known as Indian shot, which grow luxuriantly at Zimbabwe, which rattle and add to the prevailing din.

He

When we took leave of Ikomo, the induna of Zimbabwe, he was seated in front of his hut, eating his red-colored sodza, made of millet meal and locusts, allowing his head men who sat around to take occasional handfuls from his savory platter. Conversation turned on his tribe. told us how they came to Zimbabwe about forty years ago, when he was only eighteen years of age, from the neighborhood of the Sabi River, where they had lived for many years. No one was then living at Zimbabwe Hill, which was covered, as it still is in parts, with a dense jungle. No one knew anything about the ruins, neither did they seem much to care; the tradition amongst them is that white men lived there once, but the black men poisoned the water and they all died.

On leaving Zimbabwe and our work, we determined on making a tentative trip of a few days, with horses and a donkey, to see how we could manage travelling in the wilds in this country without our wagonhome. Moreover, we wished to pay a

visit to Umgabeh at his kraal, and to take | calves, which we were able to banish, but

his rival, Cherumbela, on the way back to Fort Victoria.

One lovely morning in August we left our wagons, our cook, and our curios to find their own way back to Fort Victoria, and set off. The scenery southwards down the gorge was charming, granite kopje after granite kopje carrying the eye far away into the blue, hazy distance. The foliage was thick and shady, and as we halted at a stream to water our animals we plucked large fronds of osmunda regalis and the tree-fern. To our right we passed a huge split rock, just a square block of granite eighty feet high split into four parts, so that narrow paths lead from each side into the heart of it. It was one of the most extraordinary natural stone formations I have ever seen, and the natives call it Lumbo. A relation of Umgabeh's rules over a fantastic kraal, called Baramazimba, hard by this rock; its huts are situated in such inaccessible corners you wonder how the inhabitants ever get to them. Huge trees sheltered the entrance to this village, beneath which men were seated on the ground playing Isafuba, the mysterious game of the Makalangas, with sixty holes in rows on the ground. Ten men can play at this game, and it consists in removing bits of pottery or stones from one hole to the other in an unaccountable manner. We watched it scores of times whilst in the country, and always gave it up as a bad job, deciding that it must be like draughts or chess, learnt by them from the former civilized race who dwelt there.

At midday we reached Umgabeh's kraal and found our host only just recovering from the effects of drinking too much beer, and he had a relapse in the course of the afternoon to celebrate our arrival. He allotted us two huts which we proceeded to have cleaned out. My wife and I occupied one, delightfully situated beneath a spreading cork-tree; it was about twelve feet in diameter, and in the centre was the fireplace of cement with a raised seat by it on which the cook usually sits when stirring the pot. We spread our rugs where it appeared most level, and during the night, in spite of our candle, the rats careered about us to such an alarming extent that sleep was next to impossible, and we had ample time at our disposal for contemplating our abode.

On one side was a raised place for the family jars, huge earthenware things covered with slabs of stone, containing meal, caterpillars, locusts, and other edibles. On the opposite side was a stable for the

we could not so easily control the cocks and hens which came in at all the holes, nor the rats which darted amongst the smoke begrimed rafters when day dawned. These blackened rafters of the roof the Makalangas use as cupboards, sticking therein their pipes, their weapons, their medicine phials, their tools, and their pillows, and we soon found that this was the place to look for all manner of curios, only the huts are so dark it is impossible to see anything when there happens to be no holes in the walls; a low door three feet high is the only point for admitting light and air, consequently the huts are not only dark but odoriferous.

Umgabeh's kraal has as lovely a situa tion as can well be imagined. It is situated in a glade, buried in trees and vegetation, so that until you are in it you hardly notice the spot. Huge granite mountains rise on either side, completely shutting it in; a rushing stream runs through the glade, supplying the place with delicious water. Here is distinctly a spot where only man is vile; and the great fat chief, seated on the top of a rock, sodden with beer, formed one of the vilest specimens of humanity I ever saw.

The aforesaid stream in its course down the valley, just below the village, runs underneath a vast mass of granite rocks, which form a labyrinth of caves exceedingly difficult to approach. To facilitate the entry the inhabitants have made bridges of trees, and in times of danger from the Matabele they take refuge therein; they take their cattle with them, and pull down the bridges. In the interior they always keep many granaries well filled with grain, in case of accidents. Old Umgabeh was most unwilling for us to go in and learn his tribal secret; however, nothing daunted, with the aid of candles we effected an entry, and a queer place it is. Granaries are perched in all sorts of crannies, traces of a late habitation exist all around, and the boiling stream is roaring in the crevices below.

The flat rocks outside were just now covered with locusts drying in the sun; millet meal and other domestic commodities were spread out too.

The rest of that lovely afternoon we spent in wandering about in this Paradise, admiring the dense foliage, the creepers, and the euphorbia which towered over the huts. I regretted when the pangs of hunger and the shades of evening obliged us to return to our huts to cook our frugal meal and pretend to go to bed.

It was a long ride next day to Cherum

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bela's kraal, the bitter enemy and hereditary foe of our late host; we passed many villages and many streams on the way, and had a direful experience at one of the swamps which our path crossed just before reaching our destination. One of our horses disappeared in it, all but his head, another rolled entirely over in it, whilst we stood helpless on the bank and fearful of the result, but at length we managed to drag the wretched animals out, and an hour before sundown we reached Cherumbela's stronghold.

It is quite a different place from Umgabeh's, and much larger, with huts running along the backbone of a high granite ridge. The principal kraal where the chief lives is fortified with palisades and rough walls, and is entered by a gateway formed of posts leaning against one another; the huts are better, with decorated doors, and the people finer than those of Umgabeh's tribe. Many of them have their heads cleanly shaved at the top, with a row of curious tufts of hair tied together at the top and made to look like a lot of black plants sprouting from their skulls.

Cherumbela himself is a lithe, active man, a complete contrast to Umgabeh, a man of activity both of mind and body, he is feared and respected by his men, and is consequently one of the strongest chiefs hereabouts and raids upon his neighbors with great success. Years ago when he was a boy he told us that his tribe lived on the top of one of the highest mountains overlooking Providential Pass, when a Matabele raid or impi fell upon them and drove most of the inhabitants over a steep precipice to their death; the remnant that escaped came here and settled and have now, under Cherumbela's rule, grown strong. The chief allotted us his own hut for our night's lodging. Nevertheless, we had much the same experiences as on the previous night, which made us vow that on our prospective trips to the Sabi and northwards we would take a tent and never again expose ourselves to the companionship of rats and vermin in the native huts.

The following day a lovely ride over the mountains through dense forests and swarms of locusts, which our black men eagerly collected, brought us back again to Fort Victoria and comparative civilization, where we made preparations for our more extended expeditions away from the road and our wagons, warned but not discouraged by our discomforts with Umgabeh and Cherumbela.

J. THEODORe Bent.

From Temple 'Bar.

MADAME DU CHATELET. GABRIELLE EMILIE MARQUISE DU CHATELET, one of the most remarkable women of the eighteenth century, born in Paris, December, 1706, was the daughter of the Baron de Breteuil, reader to Louis XIV., a somewhat conceited old bore, who is said to have asserted on one occasion in the most confident manner that Moses was author of the Lord's Prayer. The lady was from childhood a student, though she probably concerned herself with the paternoster as little as did her father. She early learned Latin and Italian, at fifteen commenced a translation of Virgil, was likewise an accomplished musician and sang beautifully. As years passed on, she became a successful scholar in geometry, and proved herself to possess both the will and capacity to master the philosophy of Newton. With all this she by no means played the learned lady in the great world, but followed the frivolities of the day with no less ardor than her scientific pursuits. Before she was twenty she was married to the Marquis Florent Claude du Châtelet, an officer of ancient lineage but dilapidated fortune. Strictly beautiful she was not, yet she seems to have had a countenance of much animation, abundant black hair, large, clear eyes, thick eyebrows, and a wide and intelligent forehead; and such advantages as she possessed were turned to the best account by every means which art and nature have placed within woman's reach. Heart and mind, however, seem equally to have needed occupation, and ere she was twenty-seven her list of lovers had included that irresistible Lovelace of the time — the Duke of Richelieu. Madame du Deffand, whose pen was perhaps dipped in gall, denied that she had either beauty, talent, memory, or imagination; but though she may have been deficient in the delicacy which is nowadays deemed indispensable in a woman, and in the sense of honor which is demanded of a man, such defects must be ascribed, in part at least, to the era in which her lot was cast; and it is at any rate beyond question that she possessed a hardy originality of character which runs little danger of ever becoming too ordinary a quality.

When the "divine Emilie " first met Voltaire, she was little more than a child in her father's house, nor did she again set eyes upon the author's face until the year 1733, when he was thirty-nine years of age and she twenty-seven, after she

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