The Last Frontier

IN ZANZIBAR

THERE is no name between the covers of the atlas more redolent of romance and adventure. Ever since Livingstone entered the African jungle on his mission of proselytism; ever since Stanley entered the same jungle on his quest of Livingstone; and ever since the railway-builders began to run their levels and lay their rails along the trail blazed by them both, Zanzibar has been the chief gateway through which Christianity, civilisation, and commerce have entered the Dark Continent. Though its area has been steadily lessened by spoliation, treaty, and purchase, until the sultanate, which once extended from Cape Guardafui to Delagoa Bay and inland to the Great Lakes, has dwindled to two coastwise islands in the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar the capital is still the most important place, politically and commercially, in all East Africa, and one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in the world.

It bears the impress of the many kinds of men of many nationalities—Arab sultans, slave-traders and pirates, Portuguese merchants, European explorers, and ivory-hunters—who have swaggered across the pages of its history. Four hundred years ago Vasco da Gama's exploring caravels dropped anchor in its harbour, and the architecture of the city is still Portuguese; a century later the dhows of the piratical sultans of Muskat swooped down, giving to Zanzibar an Arab dynasty, a lucrative slave trade and the Arabic tongue; then a British war-ship came, bringing with it British law and order and decency, and, under the mask of a “protectorate,” British rule. Though its golden age ended with the extermination of the trade in “black ivory,” it is still a place of considerable importance: the end of several submarine cables, a port of call for many steamship lines, a naval base within easy striking distance of the German and Portuguese colonies on the East Coast and guarding the lines of communication between the Cape and the Canal, and the place of export for the major portion of the world's supply of copra, cloves, and ivory.

Seen from the harbour, Zanzibar has little to commend it. So uninviting, indeed, is the face that it turns seaward, that the story is told of an American politician sent there as consul, who, after taking one look from the steamer's deck at the sun-baked town, with its treeless, yellow beach and its flat-roofed, whitewashed houses, refused to go ashore at all, from the next port at which the steamer called cabling his resignation to Washington. Though a city of something over one hundred thousand people, with the major portion of the trade of East Africa in its hands, Zanzibar has neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, passengers and packages alike being disembarked in small boats and carried through the surf on the shoulders of Swahili boatmen. There are no words in the language adequate to describe the scene which takes place on the beach bordering the harbour when a mail steamer comes in. The passengers—white-helmeted tourists; pompous, drill-clad officials; sallow-faced Parsee merchants; chattering Hindoo artisans; haughty, hawk-nosed Arabs; and cotton-clad Swahilis from the mainland—are unceremoniously dumped with their belongings on the sand, where they instantly become the centres of shouting, pleading, cursing, struggling, gesticulating, perspiring mobs of porters and hotel-runners, from whose rough importunities they are rescued only by the efforts of a dozen askaris, who lay their rhinoceros-hide whips about them indiscriminately.

When a poor imitation of order has been restored and the luggage has been rescued and sorted, you start for the hotel—there is only one deserving of the name—with a voluble hotel-runner clinging to your arm as though afraid you would break away, and followed by a miniature safari of porters balancing trunks, hat-boxes, kit-bags, gun-cases, bath-tubs, and the other impedimenta of an African traveller on their turbaned heads. Returning the ostentatious salute of the tan-coloured sentry at the head of the water-stairs, you follow your guide through a series of tortuous and narrow alleys, plunge into the darkness of an ill-smelling tunnel, and suddenly emerge, blinded with the sun-glare, into a thoroughfare lined on either side with tiny, fascinating, hole-in-the-wall shops, whose owners rush out and offer you their silver, ivory, and ostrich-feather wares vociferously.

Quite unexpectedly the procession halts under a swinging sign bearing the legend “Afrika Hotel.” The proprietor, a rotund, red-cheeked German who looks as if he had stepped straight out of a Munich beer-garden, escorts you pantingly up two—three—four flights of stone stairs, lined on either side with strange native weapons and East Coast curios, to a brick-floored cell under the roof, there being more likelihood of catching an occasional breeze, he explains, near the top. Wind in any form is as scarce in Zanzibar as rain is in the Sahara, and when they do get a breath of air strong enough to stir the window curtains it is as much of an event as a cyclone is in Kansas. The furniture of the room, monastic in its simplicity, consists of an iron bed, an iron table, an iron chair, and an iron washstand supporting a tin bowl and pitcher, for anything which is not of metal stands an excellent chance of destruction by the devastating swarms of red ants. The bed is draped with a double thickness of mosquito netting of so fine a mesh that the air within feels strained and unnourishing, like milk that has been skimmed and watered, and the heavy shutters are closed in a fruitless attempt to keep out some of the stifling mid-day heat, though the proprietor, after glancing at the thermometer, remarks that it isn't so hot after all, being only 120 in the shade.

THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA

THE other day two suave, frock-coated gentlemen, seated at a green-covered table in the Foreign Office in Berlin, by putting their names to the bottom of a piece of parchment, caused a territory almost as large as the State of Texas to become French, and another territory, larger than the State of Oregon, to become German. About as many people were affected, though not consulted, by that international dicker—which has passed into history as the Morocco-Equatoria Convention—as there are in the county of London. The lot of about four-fifths of these people will doubtless be materially improved, and in a few years, if they have any gratitude in their Moorish souls, they will be thanking Allah for having given them French instead of Sherifian justice. As for those Congolese blacks who compose the other fifth, they will soon find, unless I am very much mistaken, that the red-white-and-black flag stands for something very different from the red-white-and-blue one, and that the stiff-backed, guttural-tongued German officers in their tight-fitting uniforms will prove sterner masters than the easy-going French administrateurs in their topées and white linen.

Now the significance of that convention does not lie in its ethics—which are very questionable; nor in the territory and population and resources concerned—which are very great; but in the fact that it brings within reasonable measure of fulfilment the imperial dream which William II began dreaming some seven and twenty years ago, and which he recently translated to the world in the declaration “Germany's future lies oversea.” In those four words is found the foreign policy of the Fatherland. The episode which began with the sending of a war-ship to an obscure port of Morocco and ended with Germany's acquirement of a material addition to her African domain was not, as the world supposes, an example of the haphazard land-grabbing so popular with European nations, but a single phase of a vast and carefully laid scheme whose aim is the creation of a new and greater Germany oversea—a Deutschland über Meer.

To solve the problems with which she has been confronted by her amazing increase in population and production, Germany has deliberately embarked on a systematic campaign of world expansion and exploitation. Finding that she needs a colonial empire in her business, she is setting out to build one just as she would build a fleet of dreadnoughts or a ship canal. The fact that she has nothing or next to nothing to start with, does not worry her at all. What she cannot obtain by purchase or treaty site will obtain by threats, and what she cannot obtain by threats she stands perfectly ready to obtain by going to war. Having once made up her mind that the realisation of her political, commercial, and economic ambitions requires her to have a colonial dominion, she is not going to permit anything to stand in the way of her getting it. In other words, wherever an excuse can be provided for raising a flagstaff, whether on an ice-floe in the Arctic or an atoll in the South Pacific, there the German flag shall flutter; wherever trade is to be found, there Hamburg cargo boats shall drop their anchors, there Stettin engines shall thunder over Essen rails, there Solingen cutlery and Silesian cottons shall be sold by merchants speaking the language of the Fatherland. It is a scheme astounding by its very vastness, as methodically planned as a breakfast-food manufacturer's advertising campaign and as systematically conducted; and already, thanks to Teutonic audacity, aggressiveness, and perseverance, backed up by German banks, fleets, and armies, much nearer realisation than most people suppose.

In Morocco, East Africa, and the Congo; in Turkey, Persia, and Malaysia; in Hayti, Brazil, and the Argentine; on the shores of all the continents and the islands of all the seas, German merchants and German money are working twenty-four hours a day building up that oversea empire of which the Kaiser dreams. The activities of these pioneers of commerce and finance are as varied as commerce and finance themselves. Their guttural voices are heard in every market place; their footsteps resound in every avenue of human endeavour. Their holdings in Brazil are the size of European kingdoms, and so absolute has their power become in at least two states—Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul—that the Brazilian Government has become seriously alarmed. Their mines in Persia and China and the Rand rival the cave of Aladdin. They are completing a trunk line across western Asia which threatens to endanger England's commercial supremacy in India; in Africa they are pushing forward another railway from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Great Lakes which will rival the Cape-to-Cairo system in tapping the trade of the Dark Continent. They own the light, power, and transportation monopolies of half the capitals of Latin America. In China the coal mines and railways of the great province of Shantung are in their hands. They work tea plantations in Ceylon, tobacco plantations in Cuba and Sumatra, coffee plantations in Guatemala, rubber plantations in the Congo, hemp plantations in East Africa, and cotton plantations in the Delta of the Nile. Their argosies, flying the house flags of the Hamburg American, the North German Lloyd, the German East Africa, the Deutsche Levante, and a score of other lines, carry German goods to German warehouses in the world's remotest corners, while German war-ships are constantly aprowl all up and down the Seven Seas, ready to protect the interests thus created by the menace of their guns.

Back of the German miners and traders and railway builders are the great German banks, which, when all is said and done, are the real exploiters of Germany's interests oversea. So completely are the foreign interests of the nation in their hands that there is no reason to doubt the story that the Emperor, when warned by the great bankers whom he had summoned to a conference over the ominous Moroccan situation that war with France would endanger, if not destroy, Germany's oversea ambitions, turned to his ministers with the remark, “Then, gentlemen, we must find a peaceable solution.” We of the West have not yet awakened to a realisation of the magnitude of Germany's foreign interests or to the almost sovereign powers which the banks behind them exercise in certain quarters of the world—particularly in that Latin America which we have complacently regarded as securely within our own commercial sphere. In Asia Minor the Deutsche Bank not only controls the great Anatolian Railway system but it is building the Bagdad Railway—probably the most important of Germany's foreign undertakings—these two German-owned systems providing a route by which German goods can be carried over German rails to India more cheaply than England can transport her own goods to her possessions in her own bottoms. In one hand the Disconto Bank Gesellschaft holds the railway and mining concessions of the Chinese province of Shantung, while with the other it reaches out across the world to grasp the railway system of Venezuela, it being to enforce certain claims of this bank that the German gun-boat Panther—the same that occupied Agadir—bombarded La Guayra in 1902 and as a consequence brought the relations of the United States and Germany uncomfortably close to the breaking-point. Seven German banks—the German-Asiatic Bank, the German-Brazilian Bank, the German-Orient Bank, the German-Palestine Bank, the Bank of Chile and Germany, the Bank of Central America, and the German Overseas Bank—devote themselves exclusively to the exploitation of foreign concessions, either owning or dominating enterprises of every conceivable character in the regions denoted by their titles or lending financial assistance to German subjects engaged in such undertakings.

A few years ago, when Germany was starting in the race for naval supremacy, the Imperial Admiralty issued a review of Germany's oversea interests for the purpose of impressing the Reichstag with the necessity for dreadnoughts and then more dreadnoughts. Here are some of the figures, taken from the list at random, and the more impressive because they are from official sources and because, since they were published, they have materially increased:

And this endless caravan of figures represents but a fraction of Germany's transmarine interests, remember, for it does not include her colonies on both coasts of Africa, in North China, and in the South Seas. Now, if you will again glance over the above list of Germany's foreign interests, you can hardly fail to be struck by the fact that by far the greater part of them are in countries notorious for the weakness and instability of their governments, as, for example, China, Morocco, Turkey, Liberia, Mexico, and Venezuela; or in countries which, though possessing stable governments, would not be strong enough successfully to resist German aggression or German demands. In regions where German settlers abound and where German banks are in financial control it is seldom difficult for Germany to find an excuse for meddling. It may be that a German settler is attacked, or a German consul insulted, or a German bank has difficulty in collecting its debts. So the slim cables carry a dash-dotted message to the Foreign Office in Berlin; instantly the cry goes up that in Morocco or China or Venezuela or Hayti German “interests” are imperilled; and before the government of the country in question realises that anything out of the ordinary has happened a cruiser with a German flag drooping from her taffrail is lying off one of its coast towns. Before the silent menace of that war-ship is removed, Germany generally manages to obtain a concession to build a railway, or a ninety-nine-year lease of a coaling-station, or the cession of a strip of more or less valuable territory, and so goes merrily and steadily on the work of building up a German empire oversea.

But these interests, world-wide though they are, fail to satisfy the German expansionist party whose prophet is the Kaiser. They demand something more material than figures; they would see the German flag floating over government houses instead of warehouses, over fortifications instead of plantations. They would see more of the map of the world painted in German colours. But Germany was late in getting into the colonising game, so that wherever she has gone she has found other nations already in possession. In North Africa her prospectors and concession-hunters found the French too firmly established to be ousted; the only territory left in South Africa over which she could raise her flag was so arid and worthless that neither England nor Portugal had troubled to include it in their dominions; though she bullied China into leasing her the port of Kiauchau, the further territorial expansion in the Celestial Empire of which she had dreamed was halted by Russian jealousy and Japanese ambition; around Latin America—the most enticing field of all—stretched the protecting arm of the Monroe Doctrine.

Now, these “Keep Off the Grass” signs with which she was everywhere confronted did not improve Germany's disposition. They made her feel abused and peevish, and whenever she saw a foreign flag flying over some God-forsaken islet in the Pacific or a stretch of snake-infested African jungle, she resented it deeply and said that she was being denied “a place in the sun.” So when France despatched an expedition to Fez in the summer of 1911 to teach the Moorish tribesmen proper respect for French property and French lives, Germany seized on that action as an excuse for occupying a Moroccan harbour and a strip of the adjacent coast, on the pretext that her interests there were being jeopardised, and flatly refused to evacuate it unless France gave her something in return. I might mention, in passing, that Germany's interests in Morocco are considerably more important than is generally supposed, the powerful Westphalian firm of Mannesmann Brothers having obtained from Sultan Abdul Aziz extensive mining, ranching, and plantation concessions in that portion of his empire which the German newspapers proceeded to prematurely dub “West Marokko Deutsch.” The rich iron deposits in this region, when taken in conjunction with the alarming decrease of the ore supply in the German mines and the consequent shortage which threatens the German iron and steel industry, undoubtedly provided one of the reasons underlying the Kaiser's interference with the French programme in Morocco.

France, knowing full well the enormous political and commercial value of Morocco, and determined to complete her African empire by its acquirement, after months of haggling, during which battle-ships and army corps were moved about like chessmen, consented to compensate Germany by ceding her a slice of the colony of French Equatorial Africa, better known, perhaps, as the French Congo. [4] It was a good bargain that France made, too, for she took an empire and gave a jungle in exchange. But Germany made the better bargain, it seems to me, for by agreeing to a French protectorate over Morocco she obtained one hundred thousand square miles of African soil without its costing her a foot of land or a dollar in exchange. From the view-point of the world at large, Germany emerged from the Moroccan imbroglio with a good-sized strip of equatorial territory, presumably rich in undeveloped resources, certainly rich in savages, snakes, and fevers, and, everything considered, of very doubtful value. But to Germany this stretch of jungle land meant far more than that. It was a territory which she had wanted, watched, and waited for ever since she entered the game of colonial expansion. It is one of the links—in many respects the most essential one—which she requires to connect her scattered possessions in the Dark Continent and to bar the advance of her great rival, England, to the northward by stretching an unbroken chain of German colonies across Africa from coast to coast. The acquisition of that piece of west-coast jungle marked the greatest stride which Germany has yet taken in her march toward an empire oversea.

Heretofore Germany has been in much the same predicament as a boy who tries to put a picture puzzle together when some of the pieces are missing. In Germany's case the missing pieces were held by England, France, Belgium, and Portugal, and they refused to give them up. If you will open the family atlas to the map of Africa, you will see that Germany's four colonies on that continent are so widely separated that their consolidation is apparently out of the question. Northernmost of all, and set squarely in the middle of that pestilential coast-line variously named and noted for its slaves, its ivory, and its gold, and aptly called “the rottenest coast in the world,” is the colony of Togo. Approximately the size of Cuba and rich in native products, it is so remote from the other German possessions that its only value is in providing Germany with a quid pro quo which she can use in negotiating for some territory more desirable. In the right angle formed by the Gulf of Guinea is the colony of Kamerun, a rich, fertile, and exceedingly unhealthful possession about the size of Spain. Though its hinterland reaches inland to Lake Tchad, it has hitherto been destitute of good harbours or navigable rivers, being barred from the Niger by British Nigeria and from the Congo, until the recent territorial readjustment, by French Equatorial Africa. Follow the same coast-line twelve hundred miles to the southward and you will come to German Southwest Africa, a barren, inhospitable, sparsely populated land, stretching from a harbourless coast as far inland as the Desert of Kalahari. On the other side of the continent, just south of the Equator, lies German East Africa, almost twice the size of the mother country and the largest and richest of the Kaiser's transmarine possessions. The combined area of these four colonies is equal to that of all the States east of the Mississippi put together; certainly a substantial foundation on which to begin the erection of an empire, especially when it is remembered that French Africa, which now comprises forty-five per cent of the continent, is for the most part the work of but a single generation.

When Monsieur Cambon and Herr von Kiderlein-Waechter put their pens to the piece of parchment of which I have already spoken, the boundary of the Kamerun was automatically extended southward almost to the Equator and eastward some hundreds of miles to the Logone River, the apex of the angle formed by the meeting of these new frontiers touching the Congo River and thereby bringing the Kamerun into contact with the Belgian Congo. In other words, Germany's great colonies on either coast are no longer separated by French and Belgian territory, but by Belgian alone—and Belgium, remember, is both weak and neutral. Now, it is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Belgium might consent to sell Germany either the whole or a portion of the Congo, for the financial difficulties of that colony have been very great, and it has never been able to pay its way, its wants having been supplied at first by large gifts of money from King Leopold, and more recently by loans raised and guaranteed by Belgium. This unsatisfactory financial condition not having helped to popularise the Congo with the thrifty Belgians, there is considerable reason to believe that the Brussels Government would lend an attentive ear to any proposals which Germany might make toward its purchase. England might be expected, of course, to oppose the sale of the Congo to Germany tooth and nail, it being the fear of just such an eventuality which caused her to seize on the rubber atrocities as an excuse for her vigorous and persistent advocacy of the internationalisation of the Congo. Though France holds the reversionary rights to the Congo, there are no grounds for believing that she would place any serious obstacles in the way of its acquisition by Germany, for she has given it to be understood that she intends devoting her energies henceforward to the exploitation of her enormous possessions in North Africa. Assuming, then—and these assumptions, believe me, are not nearly so chimerical as they may sound—that the Belgian Government should sell Germany all or a part of the Congo, Germany's possessions would then stretch across the continent from coast to coast, comprising all that is most worth having in Equatorial Africa.

While we are about it, let us carry our assumptions one step farther and take it for granted that Portugal could be induced to dispose of her great west-coast colony of Angola, to which Germany already possesses the reversionary rights. It is not only possible, but probable, that a good round offer of money, or perhaps another Agadir performance, based on some easily found pretext and backed up by German war-ships in the Tagus, would induce the Lisbon Government to hand over Angola, along with its fevers and its slavery, to the Germans. Portugal is bitterly poor, its government is weak and vacillating, and a long list of failures has left the people with little stomach for colonisation. The Portuguese Republic has few friends among the monarchical nations of Europe and could count on scant aid from them in resisting Teutonic coercion. It is asserted in diplomatic circles, indeed, that the ink on the Morocco-Equatoria Convention was scarcely dry before the German minister in Lisbon had opened secret pourparlers with the Portuguese Foreign Office with a view to the purchase of both Angola and the east-coast colony of Mozambique. [5] The acquisition of Angola would supply Germany with the final link needed to unite her colonies in East, West, and Southwest Africa, thus giving her an African empire second in size only to that of France. Far-fetched and far-distant as all this may sound, I have but roughly sketched for you that imperial dream for whose fulfilment the Kaiser and his people are indefatigably working and confidently waiting.

Very few people are aware that, as long ago as 1898, England and Germany concluded a secret agreement which definitely provides for the eventual disposition of Portugal's African possessions. Of its true history and scope, however, little has ever leaked out. It grew out of Joseph Chamberlain's restless and ambitious schemes for the consolidation of British dominion in Africa. Appreciating, early in the Boer War, that England's success in that struggle would largely depend upon Germany remaining strictly neutral, that master statesman proposed to the Berlin Government a plan the effect of which was to divide the reversion of Angola and Mozambique between Great Britain and Germany, inferentially leaving the former a free hand south of the Zambezi. This was the famous Secret Treaty, the final text of which was afterward signed by Lord Salisbury, and it was largely in virtue of this agreement that England was free from German interference during the Boer War. It is an interesting comment on the ethics of international politics that this remarkable agreement was concluded without any consultation of Portugal, the country the most vitally concerned. Delagoa Bay is no longer as imperative a necessity to England as it was in 1898, at which time it was the quickest way to reach the Transvaal, and, on the other hand, the West Coast is daily becoming more important for strategical and commercial reasons, for the “Afro” railway, of which I have made mention in the chapter on Morocco, will become in the near future the great highway between Europe and South America, while the railway now being built between Benguela (Lobito Bay) and the Katanga region will provide the easiest and quickest means of communicating with Rhodesia and the Transvaal. The terms of the Anglo-German Secret Treaty are of interest, however, as indicating how that portion of the African continent lying south of the Congo will be eventually parcelled out, and as showing the framework on which is being slowly but surely constructed Germany's African empire.

The erection of such a German state across the middle of Africa would have far-reaching results in more directions than one. In the first place, it would end forever England's long-cherished ambition of eventually linking up her Sudanese and South African possessions and thus completing an “All Red” route from Cairo to the Cape. In the second place, Germany is now in a position to build her own transcontinental railway—from east to west instead of from north to south—on German or neutral soil all the way, thus removing the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo system, even under international auspices, to a very distant day, and making Dar-es-Salam and Duala, instead of Cape Town and Alexandria, the starting-points for those highways of steel which are destined to open up inner Africa.

It is surprising how little even the well-informed know of these far places which Germany has taken for her own. Fertile spots as any upon earth, covered with hard-wood forests and watered by many rivers, when seen from the shade of an awning over a ship's deck they are as alluring as the stage of a theatre set for a sylvan opera. Go a thousand yards back from that smiling coast, however, and the illusion disappears, for you find a country whose hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers combine to make it deserving of its title—“the white man's graveyard.” The statesmen of the Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look into the future when they raised the German flag over such lands as these. The returns they have yielded thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine than William Hohenzollern. Though subsidised German steam-ships ply along their coasts, though their forests resound to the clank and clang of German railway-builders' tools, though the plantations of government-assisted settlers dot the back country, though she has spent on them thousands of lives and millions of marks, Germany's only returns thus far have been a few annual tons of ivory, copra, and rubber, some excellent but unprofitable harbours, and many lonely stations where her sons contract fevers and pessimism. But I would stake my life that this out-of-the-way, back-of-beyond, sun-blistered, fever-stricken German Africa will be a great colony some day.

From the care with which they are laid out, from the perfection of their sanitary arrangements, from the substantiality of their public buildings and official residences and their suitability to the climatic conditions, the travellers who confine their investigations to the coast are readily deceived into thinking that Tanga and Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salam and Swakopmund and Duala are the gateways to rich and prosperous colonies. From the very outset, however, the imperial government based its claim for popular support in its colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that German colonies would attract Germans, and that in this way the language of the Fatherland would be spread abroad and eventually supplant that of Shakespeare. The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go to their own colonies, preferring those where English is the speech and where there are fewer officials and more freedom. To-day, therefore, you find the model German towns, so perfectly built that you feel as though you were walking through a municipal exhibition, almost wholly peopled by brass-bound, hide-bound officials, while the German traders are carrying on thriving businesses under the English flag at Mombasa and Zanzibar and Sierra Leone.

Now, Germany has no one but herself to blame for this condition of affairs, having brought it about by the short-sightedness of her colonial policy and the harshness and incapacity of her officials. Intending to found industrial colonies, she created military settlements instead, administering and exploiting them, not as if they were German lands, but as if they were an enemy's country. Nothing emphasises more sharply the purely military character of Germany's African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus driving the traders—who form the backbone of every colony—to take up their residence in English ports and so paralysing German trade. The soldiers, for want of something better to do, are forever seeking advancement by making unnecessary expeditions into the hinterland for the purpose of “punishing” the natives, thus causing them to migrate by wholesale into British, Belgian, and even Portuguese territory, so that the German colonies are left without labour and the plantations are consequently being ruined.

The needless severity of Germany's colonial rule is graphically illustrated by the fact that during 1911 there were 14,849 criminal convictions in German East Africa alone, or one conviction to every 637 natives; while in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among the same type of natives but under a British administration, the ratio of convictions was only one in 2,047. There is not a town in German East Africa where you cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen years, shackled together by chains running from iron collar to iron collar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the work of men under a deadly sun. Natives with bleeding backs are constantly making their way into British and Belgian territory with tales of maltreatment by German planters, while stories of German tyranny, brutality, and corruption—of some instances of which I was myself a witness—form staple topics of conversation on every club veranda and steamer's deck along these coasts. In German Southwest Africa the dearth of labour, owing to the practical extermination of the Herero nation in Germany's last “little war” in that colony, has become a serious and pressing problem. In a single campaign—which cost Germany five hundred million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers, and which could have been avoided altogether by a little tact and kindness—half the total population of the colony was killed in battle or driven into the desert to perish. That is why the builders of the Swakopmund-Otavi Railway in German Southwest Africa—the longest two-foot-gauge line in the world—have to send to Europe for their labour. Until Germany makes a radical change in her methods of colonial administration, and until she learns that traders and labourers are more essential to a colony's prosperity than pompous and domineering officials, her colonial accounts will continue to stand heaviest on the debit side of the ledger.

Successful colonial administration in Africa, as in all tropical countries, is largely a matter of temperament, and the stolid sons of the Fatherland seem, strangely enough, to be more quickly affected by the demoralising climate and to be irritated more easily than either the English or the French. The Englishman's sense of justice and the Frenchman's sense of humour are their chief assets as successful colonisers and rulers of alien peoples, but the German colonial official, who is generally serious by nature and almost always domineering as the result of his training, possesses neither of these invaluable attributes and is heavily handicapped in consequence. It is no easy task with which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness and the privations of the white man's life, and the debility that comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, when combined with the strain of governing and educating an inconceivably lazy, stubborn, stupid, and intractable people, make the job of an African official one of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the climate seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when a native fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute him with the punctiliousness which he considers his due, he flies into a rage and orders the man to be flogged. The native goes back to his village with a bleeding back and hatred in his heart, and, as likely as not, a bloody, costly, and troublesome native uprising ensues. The African native is, after all, nothing but an overgrown and very aggravating child, and his upbringing is a job for school-teachers instead of drill sergeants, and the sooner the imperial government appreciates that fact the better.

I went to German East Africa, which is the Kaiser's star colony, expecting to be deeply impressed; I came away deeply disappointed. It is only about fifty miles from Zanzibar across to Dar-es-Salam, the capital of the colony, but the local steamer, which is the size of a Hudson River tugboat and rolls horribly on the slightest provocation, manages to use up the better part of a day in making the trip. Seen from the steamer's deck, Dar-es-Salam presents one of the most enchanting pictures that I know, and every one who goes ashore there does so with high expectations. Imagine, if you can, a city of two hundred thousand people, with the imposing, red-roofed schools and churches and hospitals and barracks and municipal buildings of, say, Düsseldorf, and the white-walled, broad-verandaed, bungalow dwellings of southern California; with concrete wharves and cement sidewalks and beautifully macadamised roads and many public parks: imagine all this, I say, dropped down in the midst of a palm grove on one of the hottest and unhealthiest coasts in the world—that is Dar-es-Salam. The hotel is, barring the one at Kandy in Ceylon and another at Ancon in the Canal Zone, the best and most beautiful tropical hostelry I have ever seen, but, as it is owned and run by the government, for the benefit of its officials, its manager, a blond, florid-faced, pompadoured Prussian, was as independent as a hotel clerk in a city where a presidential convention is going on. Just as in the other German colonies, I found East Africa to be suffering from a severe attack of militarism. I saw more sentries and patrols and guards during my four days' stay in Dar-es-Salam than I did in Constantinople during the Turkish Revolution. I was lulled to sleep by regimental bugles and I was awakened by them again at daybreak, and I never set foot out of doors without meeting a column of native soldiery, their black faces peering out stolidly from beneath the sun-aprons, their spindle shanks encased in spiral puttees, their feet rising and falling in the senseless “parade step” in time to the monotonous “rechts! links! rechts! links!” of the German sergeant. But what struck me most forcibly about Dar-es-Salam was that it appeared to have no business. Apparently the soldiers had frightened it away. The harbours of Mombasa and Zanzibar and Beira and Lourenço Marques are alive with steamers taking on or discharging cargo (and quite two out of three of them fly the German flag), and their streets are lined with offices and warehouses and “factories” (over the doors of many of which are signs bearing German names), and their wharves are piled high with bales of merchandise going to or coming from the four corners of the earth; but in the harbour of Dar-es-Salam, as in all the other German harbours I visited, the only vessels are white German gun-boats or rusty German tramps; its streets are lined with government offices instead of business offices; on its wharves are a few puncheons of palm-oil, or other products of the bush, and nothing more.

Warundi warriors. German East Africa.

Native infantry. German East Africa. A few years ago these men were just such savages as those shown above.

THE HAND OF THE WAR LORD IN GERMAN AFRICA.

However much the administration of the German colonies may be open to criticism, and however slow they may have been in commercial development, I have nothing but praise and admiration for the accomplishments of their railway-builders. From Dar-es-Salam I travelled inland by railway motor-car nearly to Kilamatinde, a distance of three hundred and seventy miles, through one of the most savage regions in Africa, over one of the best graded and ballasted roadbeds I have ever seen. The line is now being pushed forward from Kilamatinde toward Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, which it will reach, so the chief engineer assured me, by the summer of 1914. From Ujiji, which, by the way, is the place where Stanley discovered Livingstone, a steamer service will be inaugurated to Albertville, on the Belgian shore of the lake, whence a line is under construction to the navigable waters of the Lualaba, which is one of the chief tributaries of the Congo; while another line of steamers will ply between Ujiji and Kituta, in northeastern Rhodesia, which point the British Cape-to-Cairo system is approaching. By the close of 1914, in all probability therefore, the traveller who lands at Dar-es-Salam will be able to travel by train, with the passage across Lake Tanganyika as the only interruption, to the Cape of Good Hope, or by train and river steamer to the mouth of the Congo, and in perfect comfort and safety all the way. As Walfish Bay, the only harbour in Southwest Africa worthy of the name, belongs to England, the Germans, finding themselves unable to buy it and appreciating that a harbourless colony is all but worthless, promptly set to work and built themselves artificial harbours at Swakopmund and at Lüderitz Bay, though at appalling cost. That Germany is exceedingly anxious to acquire Walfish Bay, and that she stands ready to make almost any reasonable concession to obtain it, there is little doubt. The mere fact that Walfish Bay is owned by England is a source of constant aggravation to the Germans, for it lies squarely in the middle of their Southwest African coast-line, its roomy roadstead and deep anchorage being in sharp contrast to the German port of Lüderitz Bay, which is being rapidly sanded up, and that of Swakopmund, a harbour on which the Berlin Government has already thrown away several millions of marks. Lüderitz Bay is already connected with the inland town of Keetmanshoop by three hundred and fifty miles of narrow-gauge line, and plans are now under consideration for pushing this southeastward so as to link up with the South African system near Kimberley, while from Swakopmund another iron highway, four hundred miles long, gives access to the Otavi copper-mining country and will doubtless be extended, in the not far-distant future, to the Rhodesian border, tapping the main line of the Cape-to-Cairo system in the neighbourhood of the Victoria Falls.

Mr. and Mrs. Powell travelling by railway motor-car in German Africa.

A way-station on the line of the German East African Railway.

RAILROADING THROUGH A JUNGLE.

I have laid considerable stress upon the subject of railways, because it seems to me that in them lies the chief hope of the German colonies, for wherever the railway goes there goes civilisation. Throughout the vast and potentially rich regions thus being opened up by the locomotive the imperial government is pouring out money unstintingly in the construction of roads, bridges, and reservoirs, the sinking of artesian wells, the establishment of telegraph lines and postal routes, the erection of schools and hospitals, in furnishing trees to the planters and machinery and live-stock to the farmers, and in assisting immigration. So, if keeping everlastingly at it brings success, I cannot but feel that the day will come when these officers and officials, these soldiers and settlers, these traders and tribesmen, will find their places and play their parts in the Kaiser's imperial scheme of a new and greater Germany over the sea.

“ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!”

IN Bulawayo, which is in Matabeleland, stands one of the most significant and impressive statues in the world. From the middle of that dusty, sun-baked thoroughfare known as Main Street rises the bronze image of a bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, his hands clasped behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in profound meditation northward over Africa. Cecil John Rhodes was the dreamer's name, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa through the centre and picking up trade all the way.”

If ever a man was a strange blending of dreamer and materialist, of utopian and buccaneer, of Clive and Hastings with Hawkins and Drake, it was Cecil Rhodes. In other words, he dreamed great dreams and let no scruples stand in the way of their fulfilment. Having trekked over nearly the whole of that vast territory that stretches northward from the Orange and the Vaal to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, his imagination saw in this fertile, sparsely settled country virgin soil for the building up of a new and greater Britain. The predominance of the British in Egypt and in South Africa, and the fact that the territory under British control stretched with but a single break from the mouths of the Nile to Table Bay, gave rise in the great empire-builder's mind to the project of a trunk-line railway “from the Cape to Cairo,” and under the British flag all the way. Though Rhodes's dream of an “All Red” railway was rudely shattered by the Convention of 1889, which allowed Germany to stretch a barrier across the continent from the Indian Ocean to the Congo State, he never abandoned the hope that a British zone would eventually be acquired through German East Africa, either by treaty or purchase, even going so far as to open negotiations with the Kaiser to this end on his own initiative.

It was a picturesque vision, said the men to whom he confided his dream, but impractical and impossible, for in those days the line from Alexandria to Assuan and another from Cape Town to Kimberley practically comprised the railway system of the continent, and five thousand miles of unmapped forest, desert, and jungle, filled with hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers, lay between. But the man who had added to the British Empire a territory greater than France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy combined; who had organised the corporation controlling the South African diamond fields; who had put down a formidable native uprising by going unarmed and unaccompanied into the rebel camp; and who was responsible, more than any other person, for the Boer War, was not of the stamp which is daunted by either pessimistic predictions or obvious obstacles.

It was a slow and disheartening business at first, this building of a railway with a soul-inspiring name. The discovery of the diamond fields had already brought the line up to Kimberley; the finding of gold carried it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enterprise—the actual proof, as it were, of the British occupation. But the Boer War was scarcely over, the national purse was drained almost dry, and even the most optimistic financiers shrank from the enormous expense and problematical success of building a railway into the heart of a savage and unknown country.

Finally Rhodes turned to the imperial government for assistance in this imperial enterprise, for the man who had added Zululand, Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, Barotseland, and Nyasaland to the empire felt that the empire owed him something in return. He first laid his scheme before Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, who said that nothing could be done until he had a closer estimate of the expense. Returning to Central Africa, Rhodes had a flying survey of the route made in double-quick time, and with the figures in his pocket hastened back to London. This time the premier sent him to see Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the chancellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach, who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure of national funds, was frigid and discouraging, but finally relaxed enough to say: “Get a proper survey made of your proposed railway, with estimates drawn up by responsible engineers, and if the figure is not too unreasonable we will see what can be done.” Fortified with this shred of hope, Rhodes again betook himself to the country north of the Zambezi, and, after months of work, hardship, and privation, facing death from native spears, poisonous snakes, and the sleeping-sickness, his men weakened by malaria and his animals killed by the dreaded tsetse-fly, he returned to England and presented his revised surveys and estimates to the chancellor of the exchequer. That immaculately clad statesman negligently twirled his eye-glass on its string as he regarded with obvious disfavour the fever-sunken cheeks and unkempt appearance of the pioneer. “Really, Mr. Rhodes,” he remarked coldly, “I fear it is quite out of the question for her Majesty's government to lend your scheme its countenance or assistance.” It is a pleasingly human touch that as the indignant empire-builder went out of the minister's room he slammed the door so that the pictures rattled on the wall.

After dinner that night Rhodes strolled over to see a friend of Kimberley days, a Hebrew financier named Alfred Beit, in whom he found a sympathetic listener. As Rhodes took his hat to go, Beit casually remarked, “Look here, Rhodes, you'll want a start. Four and a half million pounds is a big sum to raise. We'll do half a million of it, Wernher [his partner] and I.” That meant success. Though ministers of the Crown turned a cold shoulder to the great imperialist who came to them with a great imperial enterprise, help came from two German Jews who had become naturalised Englishmen. The next day the City brought the total up to a million and a half, and within little more than a fortnight the entire four and a half millions were subscribed, the three names, Rhodes, Beit, and Wernher, being accepted by the man in the street as sufficient guarantee of success. It was in this fashion that Cecil Rhodes raised the money for another great stride in his railway march northward.

By 1904 the road had progressed as far as the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, where it crosses the river on a wonderful steel-arch bridge—the highest in the world—its span, looking for all the world like a frosted cobweb, rising four hundred and twenty feet above the angry waters. “I want the bridge to cross the river so close to the falls,” directed Rhodes, “that the travellers will have the spray in their faces.” “That is impossible,” objected the engineers. “What you ask cannot be done.” “Then I will find some one who can do it,” said Rhodes—and he did. The bridge was built where he wanted it, and as the Zambezi Express rolls out above the torrent the passengers have to close the windows to keep from being drenched with spray. By 1906 the rail-head had been pushed forward to Broken Hill, a mining centre in northern Rhodesia; three years later found it at Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo border. Here the task of construction was taken up by the Katanga Railway Company, and in February, 1911, freight and passenger trains were in operation straight through to Elisabethville, in the heart of the Belgian Congo, two thousand three hundred and sixteen miles north of Cape Town and only two hundred and eighty miles from the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.

As you sit on the observation platform of your electric-lighted sleeping-car, anywhere along that section of the “Cape-to-Cairo” between Cape Town and the Zambezi, you rub your eyes incredulously as you watch the rolling, verdure-clad plains stretching away to the foot-hills of distant ranges, and note the entire absence of those dense forests and steaming jungles which have always been associated, in the minds of most of us, with Central Africa. The more you see of this open, homely, rather monotonous country the harder it becomes for you to convince yourself that you are really in the heart of that mysterious, storied Dark Continent and not back in America again.

And the illusion is completed by the people, for the only natives you see are careless, happy, decently clad darkies who might have come straight from the levees of Vicksburg or New Orleans, while on every station platform are groups of fine, bronze-faced, up-standing fellows in corded riding-breeches and brown boots, their flannel shirts open at the neck, their broad-brimmed hats cocked rakishly—just such types, indeed, as were common beyond the Mississippi twenty years ago, before store clothes and the motor-car had spoiled the picturesqueness of our own frontier.

North of the Zambezi it is a different story, however, for there it is frontier still, with many of a frontier's drawbacks, for the prices of necessities are exorbitant and of luxuries fantastic; skilled workmen can command almost any wages they may ask, and common labour is both scarce and poor. The miner, the scientifically trained farmer, and the skilled workman have rich opportunities in this quarter of Africa, however, for the mineral wealth is amazing, much of the soil is excellent, and civilisation is advancing over a great area with three-league boots.

For excitement, variety, and picturesqueness I doubt if the journey through Barotseland and the Katanga district of the Congo can be equalled on any railway in the world. It is true that the Uganda Railway—which, by the way, does not touch Uganda at all—has been better advertised, but in quantity of game and facilities for hunting it the territory through which it runs is no whit superior to that traversed by the “Cape-to-Cairo.” Stroll a mile up or down the Zambezi from the railway bridge and you can see hippos as easily as you can at the Zoo in Central Park; in Northwest Rhodesia herds of bush-buck, zebras, and ostriches scamper away at sight of the train; and as you lie in your sleeping-berth at night, while the train halts on lonely sidings, you can hear the roar of lions and see the gleam of the camp-fires by means of which the railway employees keep them away. On one occasion, when our train was lying on a siding south of the Zambezi, the conductor of the dining-car suddenly exclaimed, “Look there, gentlemen—look over there!” His excitement was justified, for from over a screen of bushes, scarcely a biscuit's throw away, a herd of five giraffes craned their preposterous necks and peered at us curiously. Once, when I was travelling through Northwest Rhodesia, our engine struck a bull elephant which had decided to contest the right of way. As the train was running at full speed, both engine and elephant went off the track. Returning that way some days later, we noted that the local station-master had scraped the gargantuan skull to the bone, filled it with earth, and set it on the station platform as a jardinière to grow geraniums in. He was an ingenious fellow.

From the Cairo end, meanwhile, the northern section of the great transcontinental system was being pushed steadily, if slowly, southward. The difficulties of river transportation experienced by the two Sudanese expeditions had proved conclusively that if the Sudan was ever to be opened up to European exploitation it must be by rail rather than by river. It was the Khalifa who was unconsciously responsible for the rapid completion of much of the Sudanese section of the “Cape-to-Cairo,” for, in order to come to hand-grips with him, Kitchener and his soldiers pushed the railway down the desert to Khartoum at record speed, laying close on two miles of track between each sunrise and sunset. There it halted for a number of years; but after the British had done their work, and Khartoum had been transformed from a town of blood, lust, and fanaticism into a city with broad, shaded streets, along which stalks law and order in the khaki tunic of a Sudanese policeman, the railway-building fever, which affects some men as irresistibly as the Wanderlust does others, took hold of Those Who Have the Say, and the line was again pushed southward, along the banks of the Blue Nile, to Sennar, one hundred and fifty-eight miles south of Khartoum. With the completion, in 1910, of several iron bridges, it was advanced to Kosti, a post on the White Nile, with the northern end of Lake Tanganyika some twelve hundred miles away.

That a few more years will see the northern section extending southward, via Gondokoro, to Lake Victoria Nyanza, and the southern section northward to Lake Tanganyika, there is little doubt. Indeed, the plans are drawn, the routes mapped, the levels run, and on the Katanga-Tanganyika section the railway-builders are even now at work. But when the Victoria Nyanza has been reached by the one section, and Tanganyika by the other, there will come a halt, for between the two rail-heads there will still be six hundred miles of intervening territory—and that territory is German.

Unless, therefore, England can obtain, by treaty or purchase, a railway zone across German East Africa, such as we have obtained for the Canal across the Isthmus of Panama, it looks very much as though there would never be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape, and as though the life dream of Cecil John Rhodes would vanish into thin air. There are several reasons why Germany is not inclined to give England the much-desired right of way. First, because between the two nations a bitter rivalry, political and commercial, exists, and the Germans feel that already far too much of the continent is under the shadow of the Union Jack; secondly, because the Germans are, as I have already mentioned in the preceding chapter, themselves building a railway from Dar-es-Salam, the capital of their east-coast colony, to Lake Tanganyika, and by means of this line they expect to divert to their own ports the trade of all that portion of inner Africa lying between Rhodesia and the Sudan; thirdly, because it is unlikely in the extreme that England would give Germany such a quid pro quo as she would demand—as, for example, the cession of Walfish Bay, the British port in German Southwest Africa, or of the British protectorate of Zanzibar, or of both; fourthly, because the Germans now have the British in just such a predicament regarding the completion of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway as the British have the Germans regarding the completion of the Bagdad railway. In other words, the only condition on which either country will permit its rival's railway to be built through its territory is internationalisation.

That there will ever be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape seems to me exceedingly doubtful, for the political, territorial, and financial obstacles are many, and not easily to be disposed of; but that the not-far-distant future will see the completion, under international auspices, of this great transcontinental trunk line seems to me to be as certain as that the locomotive sparks fly upward or that the hoar-frost on the rails disappears before the sun. Rhodes always said that the success of such a system must largely depend on the junctions to the east and west coasts, which would affect such a line very much as tributary streams affect a river. A number of such feeders are already in operation and others are rapidly building. Beginning at the north, the main line of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is tapped at Cairo by the railways from Port Said and Suez; and at Atbara Junction, in the Sudan, a constantly increasing stream of traffic flows in over the line from Port Sudan, a harbour recently built to order on the Red Sea. The misnamed Uganda Railway is in regular operation between Mombasa on the Indian Ocean and Port Florence on the Victoria Nyanza, whence there is a steamer service to Entebbe in Uganda. From Dar-es-Salam, the capital of German East Africa, the Germans are rushing a railway through to Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the engineer-in-chief assuring me that it would be completed and in operation by the summer of 1914. From Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, the Beira, Mashonaland, and Rhodesia Railway carries an enormous stream of traffic inland to its junction with the main line at Bulawayo. Still farther south a line from the Portuguese possession of Delagoa Bay connects with the main system at Mafeking, on the borders of Bechuanaland, while Kimberley is the junction for a line from Durban, in Natal, and De Aar for feeders from East London and Port Elizabeth, in Cape of Good Hope.

From Swakopmund, on the other side of the continent, a railway has already been pushed nearly five hundred miles into the interior of German Southwest Africa which will eventually link up with the “Cape-to-Cairo” in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls, running through German territory practically all the way. Still another line is being built inland from Lobito Bay in Angola (Portuguese West Africa) to join the transcontinental system near the Congo border, nearly half of its total length of twelve hundred miles being completed. It is estimated that by means of this line the journey between England and the cities of the Rand will be shortened by at least six days. It will be seen, therefore, that the “Cape-to-Cairo” system will have eleven great feeders, eight of which are already completed and in operation, while all of the remaining four will be carrying freight and passengers before the close of 1914.

When the last rail of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is laid, and the last spike driven, its builders may say, without fear of contradiction, “In all the world no road like this.” And in the nature of things it is impossible that there can ever be its like again, for there will be no more continents to open up, no more frontiers to conquer. It will start on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean and end under the shadow of Table Mountain. In between, it will pass through jungle, swamp, and desert; it will zigzag across plains where elephants play by day and lions roar by night; it will corkscrew up the slopes of snow-capped mountains, meander through the cultivated patches of strange inland tribes, stride long-legged athwart treacherous, pestilential swamps, plough through the darkness of primeval forests, and stretch its length across the rolling, wind-swept veldt, until it finally ends in the great antipodean metropolis on the edge of the Southern Ocean. On its way it traverses nearly seventy degrees of latitude, samples every climate, touches every degree of temperature, experiences every extreme. At Gondokoro, in the swamp-lands of the Sudd, the red-fezzed engine-driver will lean gasping from his blistered cab; at Kimberley, in the highlands of the Rand, he will stamp with numbed feet and blow with chattering teeth on his half-frozen fingers.

The traveller who climbs into the Cape-to-Cairo Limited at the Quay Station in Alexandria, in response to the conductor's cry of “All aboard! All aboard for Cape Town!” can lean from the window of his compartment as the train approaches Cairo and see the misty outlines of the Pyramids, those mysterious monuments of antiquity which were hoary with age when London was a cluster of mud huts and Paris was yet to be founded in the swamps beside the Seine; at Luxor he will pass beneath the shadow of ruined Thebes, a city beside which Athens and Rome are ludicrously modern; at Assuan he will catch a glimpse of the greatest dam ever built by man—a mile and a quarter long and built of masonry weighing a million tons—holding in check the waters of the longest river in the world; at Khartoum, peering through the blue-glass windows which protect the passengers' eyes from the blinding sun glare, he can see the statue of Gordon, seated on his bronze camel, peering northward across the desert in search of the white helmets that came too late; at Entebbe his eyes will be dazzled by the shimmering waters of the Victoria Nyanza, barring Lake Superior the greatest of all fresh-water seas; at Ujiji he will see natives in German uniforms drilling on the spot where Stanley discovered Livingstone. He will hold his breath in awe as the train rolls out over the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, for there will lie below him the mightiest cataract in the world—an unbroken sheet of falling, roaring, smoking water, two and a half times the height and ten times the width of the American Fall at Niagara; at Kimberley he will see the great pits in the earth which supply the women of the world with diamonds; in the outskirts of Johannesburg he will see the mountains of ore from which comes one-third of the gold supply of the world. And finally, when his train has at last come to a halt under the glass roof of the Victoria Terminal in Cape Town, with close on six thousand miles of track behind it, the traveller, if he has any imagination and any appreciation in his soul, will make a little pilgrimage to that spot on the slopes of Table Mountain known as “World's View,” where another statue of that same bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, this time guarded by many British lions, stares northward over Africa. He will take his stand in front of that mighty memorial and, lifting his hat, will say: “You, sir, were a great man, the greatest this benighted continent has ever known, and if one day it is transformed into a land of civilisation, of peace, and of prosperity, it will be due, more than anything else, to the great iron highway, from the Nile's mouth to the continent's end, which is the fulfilment of your dream.”

THE LAST STAND OF THE PIONEER

WHEN the penniless younger son of the English society play is jilted by the luxury-loving heroine, he invariably packs his portmanteau and betakes himself to Rhodesia to make his fortune. Fifty years ago he sought the golden fleece in California; thirty years ago he took passage by P. & O. boat for the Australian diggings; ten years ago he helped to swell the mad rush to the Yukon; to-day his journey's end is the newest of the great, new nations—Rhodesia. He returns in the fourth act, broad-hatted, bronzed, and boisterous, to announce that he is the owner of a ten-thousand-acre farm, or a diamond field, or a gold mine, or all of them, and that he has come home to find a girl to share his farm-house on the Rhodesian veldt, where good cooking is more essential in a wife than good clothes and a good complexion.

Now, beyond having a vague idea that Rhodesia is a frontier country somewhere at the back of beyond, there is only about one in every fifty of the audience who has any definite notion where or what it really is. Picture, then, if you can, a territory about the size of all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together, with the dry, dusty, sunny climate of southern California and the fertile, rolling, well-watered, and well-wooded surface of Indiana; picture such a country dropped down in the heart of equatorial Africa—that is Rhodesia. It lies a little above and to the right of that speckled yellow patch on the map of Africa which was labelled in our school geographies the Kalahari Desert. Bearing the name of the great empire-builder is the whole of that region which is bounded on the north by the Congo and the sleeping-sickness, on the east by Mozambique and the black-water fever, on the west by Angola and the cocoa atrocities, and on the south by the Transvaal and the discontented Dutch. It is watered by the Limpopo, which forms its southernmost boundary; by the Zambezi, which separates Southern Rhodesia from the northeast and northwest provinces; and by the innumerable streams which unite to form the Congo.

When the railway which English concessionaires are now pushing inland from the coast of Angola to the Zambezi is completed, the front door to Rhodesia will be Lobito Bay, thus bringing Bulawayo within sixteen days of the Strand by boat and rail. At present, however, the country must be entered through the cellar, which means Cape Town and a railway journey of fourteen hundred miles; or by the side door at Beira, a fever-stricken Portuguese town on the East Coast, which is fortunate in being but a night's journey by rail from the Rhodesian frontier and is, in consequence, the gateway through which British jams, American harvesters, and German jack-knives are opening up inner Africa to foreign exploitation.

The Rhodesia-bound traveller who escapes landing at Beira in a basket is fortunate, for it has a poorly sheltered harbour and neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, so that in the monsoon months, when the great combers come roaring in from the Indian Ocean mountain-high, there is about as much chance of getting the steam tender alongside the rolling liner as there is of getting a frightened horse alongside a panting automobile. If a dangerous sea is running, the disembarking passenger is put into a cylindrical, elongated basket, a sort of enlarged edition of those used for soiled towels in the lavatories of hotels; a wheezing donkey-engine swings it up and outward and, if the man at the lever calculates the roll of the ship correctly, drops it with a thud on the deck of the tender plunging off-side.

Built on a stretch of sun-baked sand, between a miasmal jungle and the sea, Beira is the hottest and unhealthiest place in all East Africa. “It is one of the places that the Lord has overlooked,” remarked a sallow-faced resident, as he took his hourly dose of quinine. Even the paid-to-be-enthusiastic author of the steamship company's glowing booklet hesitates at depicting this fever-haunted, sun-baked, sand-suffocated seaport of Mozambique, contenting himself with the noncommittal statement that “it is indescribable; it is just Beira.” The town has but three attractions: a broad-verandaed hotel where they charge you forty cents for a lemonade with no ice in it; a golf course, laid out by a newly arrived Englishman, who died of sunstroke the first day he played on it; and a trolley system which makes every resident the owner of his own street-car. The heat in Beira being too great to permit of walking—a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to one hundred and twenty degrees; the streets being too deep in sand for the use of vehicles; and the tsetse-fly killing off horses in a few days, those European traders and officials who are condemned to dwell in Beira get about in “trolleys” of their own. These two-seated, hooded conveyances, which are a sort of cross between a hand-car, a baby-carriage, and the wheeled chairs on the board walk at Atlantic City, are pushed by half-naked and perspiring natives over a track which extends from one end of the town to the other and with sidings into every man's front yard. It struck me, however, that the most interesting things in Beira were the corrugated-iron shanty and the stretch of wooden platform which mark the terminus of the railway, and from which, in answer to my anxious queries, I was assured that a train departed twice weekly for Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. I used to sit on the veranda of the hotel and stare across the stretch of burning sand at that wretched station as longingly as the small boy stares at the red numeral on the calendar which indicates the Fourth of July.

A temperature of one hundred and eighteen degrees in my compartment of the sleeping-car; miasma rising in cloud wreaths from the jungle; a station platform, alive with slovenly Portuguese soldiers with faces as yellow as their uniforms; helmeted, gaunt-cheeked traders and officials, and cotton-clad Swahilis, comprised my last recollection of Beira and the terrible East Coast. The next morning I awoke in my compartment shivering, not from fever but from cold. Gone, as though in a bad dream, were the glaring sands, the steaming jungle, and the sallow, fever-racked men. Instead, my car window framed a picture of rolling, grass-covered uplands, dotted here and there with herds of grazing cattle and substantial, whitewashed farm-houses, while back of all was the gray-blue of distant mountains. As I looked at the transformed landscape incredulously, the train halted at a way-station swarming with broad-hatted, flannel-shirted, sun-tanned men with clean-cut Anglo-Saxon faces. A row of saddle-horses were tied to the station fence, while their owners stamped up and down the platform impatiently, awaiting the sorting of the infrequent mail from home; a democrat wagon and a clumsy Cape cart were drawn up in the roadway; and at a house close by a woman in a sunbonnet was feeding chickens. “Where are we?” I inquired of the guard, as he passed through the train. “We're just into Rhodesia now, sir,” said he, touching his cap. “This is Umtali, in Mashonaland.” (Now, if I had asked that same question of a brakeman on one of our own railways, he would probably have answered, with the independence of his kind: “Can't you read the sign on the station for yourself?”) “Surely there must be some mistake,” I said to myself. “This cannot be Central Africa, for where are the impenetrable jungles through which Livingstone cut his way, the savage animals which Du Chaillu shot, and the naked savages with whom Stanley alternately battled and bartered? This is not Africa; this is our own West, with its men in corduroy and sombreros and its women in gingham, with its open, rolling prairies and its air like dry champagne.” Indeed, throughout my stay in Rhodesia I could not rid myself of the impression that I was back in the American West of thirty years ago, before the pioneer, the prospector, and the cow-puncher had retreated before the advance of the railway, the harvester, and the motor-car.

The story of the taking and making of Rhodesia forms one of the most picturesque and thrilling chapters in the history of England's colonial expansion. About the time that the nineteenth century had reached its turning-point, a strange tale, passing by word of mouth from native kraal to native kraal, came at last to the ears of a Scotch worker in the mission field of Bechuanaland. It was a tale of a waterfall somewhere in the jungles of the distant north; a waterfall so mighty, declared the natives, that the spray from it looked like a storm cloud on the horizon and the thunder of its waters could be heard four days' trek away. So the missionary, wearied with the tedium of proselyting amid a peaceful people and restless with the curiosity of the born explorer, set out on a long and lonely march to the northward, through a country which no white man's eyes had ever seen. It took him three years to reach the falls for which he started, but when at last he stood upon the brink of the canyon and looked down upon the waters of the Zambezi as they hurtled over four hundred feet of sheerest cliff, he was so awed by their majesty and their beauty that he named them after Victoria, the young English queen. Before he left the missionary-explorer carved his name on the trunk of a near-by tree, where it can be seen to-day; the name is David Livingstone.

For a quarter of a century the regions adjacent to the Zambezi were disturbed only by migratory bands of natives and marauding animals. Then Stanley came with his mile-long caravan of porters, halting long enough to explore and map the region, on his historic march from coast to coast. In the middle eighties a young English prospector, trekking through the country with a single wagon, found that for which he was seeking—gold. Likewise he saw that its verdure-clad prairies would support many cattle and that its virgin soil was adapted for many kinds of crops; that it was, in short, a white man's country. Unarmed and unaccompanied, he penetrated to the kraal of Lobenguela, the chief of the warlike Matabele, who occupied the region, and induced him to sign a treaty placing his country under British protection. The price paid him was five hundred dollars a month and a thousand antiquated rifles; cheap enough, surely, for a territory three times the size of Texas and as rich in natural resources as California. A year later the British South Africa Company, a corporation capitalised at thirty million dollars, under a charter granted by the Imperial Government, began the work of exploiting the concession; naming it, properly enough, after Cecil John Rhodes, the lone prospector who, with the vision of a prophet, had foreseen its possibilities and by whose unaided efforts it had been obtained. Such was the first step in Rhodes's policy of British expansion northward—a policy so successful that in his own lifetime he saw the frontiers of British Africa pushed from the Orange River to the Nile.

To hand over a colonial possession, its inhabitants and its resources, to be administered and exploited by a private corporation, sounds like a strange proceeding to American ears. Imagine turning the Philippines over to the Standard Oil Company and giving that corporation permission to appoint its own officials, make its own laws, assess its own taxes, and maintain its own military force in those islands. That, roughly speaking, was about what England did when she turned Rhodesia over to the chartered company. It should be remembered, however, that, beginning when the European nations were entering upon an era of economic exploration of hitherto virgin territories, these chartered companies have played a large part in the history of colonisation in general and in the upbuilding of the British Empire in particular, though in the great majority of cases it was trade, not empire, at which they aimed. Warned, however, by the fashion in which the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company abused their power, the British Government keeps a jealous eye on the activities of the Rhodesian concessionaires, their charter, while conferring broad trading privileges and great administrative powers, differing from earlier instruments in neither delegating sovereignty nor granting an exclusive monopoly.

The Rhodesia protectorate is the result of the consolidation of four great native kingdoms: Mashonaland in the southeast, Matabeleland in the southwest, Barotseland in the northwest, and in the northeast a portion of the now separately administered protectorate of Nyasaland. Practically the whole country is an elevated veldt, or plateau, ranging from three thousand five hundred to five thousand feet above sea-level; studded with granite kopjes which in the south attain to the dignity of a mountain chain; well watered by tributaries of the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Limpopo; and covered with a luxuriant vegetation. Like California, Southern Rhodesia has a unique and hospitable climate, free from the dangerous heats of an African summer and from cold winds in winter. Though the climate of nearly all of Southern Rhodesia is suitable for Europeans, much of the trans-Zambezi provinces, especially along the river valleys and in the low-lying, swampy regions near the great equatorial lakes, reeks with malaria, while in certain other areas, now carefully delimited and guarded by governmental regulation, the tsetse-fly commits terrible ravages among cattle and horses and the sleeping-sickness among men. The climate as a whole, however, is characterised by a rather remarkable equability of temperature, especially when it is remembered that Rhodesia extends from the borders of the temperate zone to within a few degrees of the equator. At Salisbury, the capital, for example, the mean July temperature is 57.5° and for January 70.5°, the extremes for the year ranging from 34° to 93°. It is a significant fact, however, that the glowing prospectuses of the chartered company touch but lightly on the climatic conditions which prevail north of the Zambezi, a region from which, it struck me, the European settler who does not possess a system that is proof against every form of tropical fever, a head that is proof against sunstroke, and a mind which is proof against that oftentimes fatal form of homesickness which the army surgeons call nostalgia, is much more likely to go home in a coffin than in a cabine de luxe.

In mines of gold, of silver, and of diamonds Rhodesia is very rich; agriculturally it is very fertile, for in addition to the native crops of rice, tobacco, cotton, and india-rubber, the fruits, vegetables, and cereals of Europe and America are profitably grown. The great fields of maize, or “mealies,” as all South Africans call it, through which my train frequently passed, constantly reminded me of scenes in our own “corn belt”; but in the watch-towers which rise from every corn-field, atop of which an armed Kaffir sits day and night to protect the crops from the raids of wild pigs and baboons, Rhodesia has a feature which she is welcome to consider exclusively her own.

Though Rhodesia is distinctly a frontier country, with many of a frontier's defects, her towns—Salisbury, Bulawayo, Umtali, and the rest—are not frontier towns as we knew them in Butte, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Carson City. There are saloons, of course, but they are not of the “gin palace” variety, nor did it strike me that intoxication was particularly common; certainly nothing like what it used to be during the gold-rush days in Alaska or in our own West. This may be due to the fantastic prices charged for liquor—a whiskey-and-soda costs sixty cent—and then again it maybe due to the fact that most of the settlers have brought their families with them, so that, instead of spending their evenings leaning over green tables or polished bars, they devote them to cricket, gardening, or a six-weeks-old English paper. Though nearly every one goes armed, the streets of the Rhodesian towns are as peaceable as Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston, on a Sunday morning. Indeed, the commandant of police in Bulawayo assured me that he had had only one shooting affray during his term of office. In Rhodesia, should a man draw his gun as the easiest means of settling a quarrel, his companions, instead of responding by drawing theirs, would probably call a constable and have him bound over to keep the peace. Even the rights of the natives are rigidly safeguarded by law, an American settler in Umtali complaining to me most bitterly that “it's more dangerous for a white man to kick a nigger down here than it is for him to kill one in the States.” Now, all this was rather disappointing for one who, like myself, was on the lookout for the local colour and picturesqueness and whoop-her-up-boys excitement which one naturally associates with life on a frontier; but I might have expected just what I found, for wherever the flag of England flies, whether over the gold-miners of the Yukon, the ivory-traders of Uganda, or the settlers of Rhodesia, there will be found the deep-seated respect of the Englishman for English order and English law.

In my opinion the country club, more than any other single factor, has contributed most to the making, socially and morally, of Rhodesia. Though the American West is dotted with just such towns as Salisbury, Bulawayo, Gwelo, and Umtali, with the same limitations, pitfalls, and possibilities, the men's centre of interest, after the day's work is over, is the saloon, the dance-hall, or the barber-shop with a pool-room in the rear. They do things differently in central Africa. In every Rhodesian town large enough to support one—and the same is true of all Britain's colonial possessions—I found that a “sports club” had been established on the edge of the town. Often it was nothing but a ramshackle shed or cottage that had been given a coat of paint and had a veranda added, but files of the English newspapers and illustrated weeklies were to be found inside, while from the tea tables on the veranda one overlooked half a dozen tennis courts, a cricket ground, and a foot-ball field. It is here that the settlers—men, women, and children—congregate toward evening, to discuss the crop prospects, the local taxes, the latest gold discoveries, and, above all else, the news contained in the weekly mail from home. Why have not our own progressive prairie towns some simple social system like this? It was in speaking of this very thing that the mayor of Salisbury—himself an American-remarked: “In the little, every-day things which make for successful colonisation of a new country, you fellows in the States are twenty years behind us.”

Living is expensive in Rhodesia, the prices of necessaries usually being high and of luxuries ofttimes fantastic. To counterbalance this, however, wages are extraordinarily high. It is useless to attempt to quote wages, for the farther up-country a man gets the higher pay he can command, so I will content myself with the bare statement that for the skilled workman, be he carpenter, blacksmith, mason, or wheelwright, larger wages are to be earned than in any part of the world that I know. The same is true of the man who has had practical experience in agriculture or stock-raising, there being a steady demand for men conversant with dairying, cattle-breeding, and irrigation. Let me drive home and copper-rivet the fact, however, that in Rhodesia, as in nearly all new countries, where there is a considerable native population to draw upon, there is no place for the unskilled labourer.

For the man with resource and a little capital there are many roads to wealth in British Africa. I know of one, formerly a laundry employee in Chicago, who landed in Rhodesia with limited capital but unlimited confidence. Recognising that the country had arrived at that stage of civilisation where the people were tired of wearing flannel shirts, but could not afford to have white ones ruined by Kaffir washermen, he started a chain of sanitary up-to-date laundries, and is to-day one of the wealthy men of the colony. If you ever had to pay one of his laundry bills you would understand why. Another American, starting business as a hotel-keeper in Salisbury, soon perceived that the people were ripe for some form of amusement other than that provided by the cricket fields and saloons; so he built a string of cinematograph and vaudeville theatres combined, and to-day, on the very spot where Lobenguela's medicine-men performed their bloody rites a dozen years ago, you can hear the whir of the moving-picture machine and see on the canvas screen a military review at Aldershot or a bathing scene at Asbury Park. Still another American whom I met has increased the thickness of his wallet by supplying prospectors and settlers with sectional houses which are easily portable and can be erected in an hour. Taking the circular, conical-roofed hut of the Matabele as his model, he evolved an affair of corrugated iron which combines simplicity, portability, and practicability with a low price, so that to-day, as you travel through Rhodesia, you will see these American-made imitations of Kaffir huts dotting the veldt.

Though Rhodesia has a black population of one million six hundred thousand, as against twenty thousand whites, there has thus far been no such thing as race troubles or a colour question, due in large measure, no doubt, to the firm and just supervision exercised by the British resident commissioners. Arms, ammunition, and liquor excepted, natives and Europeans are under the same conditions. Land has been set apart for tribal settlements, the mineral rights being reserved to the company, but, if the native occupation is disturbed, new lands must immediately be assigned, all disputes being ultimately referrible to the British high commissioner. Those natives living near the towns are segregated in settlements of their own, a native under no circumstances being permitted to remain within the town limits after nightfall, or to enter them in the day-time without a pass signed by the commandant of police. Though possessing many of the temperamental characteristics of the American negro, and in particular his aversion for manual work, the Rhodesian native is, on the whole, honest and trustworthy, a well-disciplined and efficient force of native constabulary having been recruited from the warlike Barotse and Matabele.

MORE WORK FOR THE PIONEER.
In the heart of the jungle in Northeastern Rhodesia near the Congo border. This is the sort of country through which portions of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway will pass.

Highways of steel bisect Rhodesia in both directions. From Plumtree, on the borders of Bechuanaland, the Rhodesian section of the great Cape-to-Cairo system stretches straight across the country to Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo frontier, while another line, the Rhodesia, Mashonaland, and Beira, links up, as its name indicates, the transcontinental system with the East Coast. Though the much-advertised Zambezi Express is scarcely the “veritable train de luxe” which the railway folders call it, it is a comfortable enough train nevertheless, with electric-lighted dining and sleeping cars, the latter being fitted, as befits a dusty country, with baths. The dining-car tariff is on a sliding scale; the farther up-country you travel the higher the prices ascend. Between Cape Town and Mafeking the charges for meals seemed to me exceedingly reasonable (fifty cents for breakfast, sixty cents for luncheon, and seventy-five cents for dinner); between Mafeking and Bulawayo they are only moderate; between Bulawayo and the Zambezi they are high; and north of the Zambezi—when you can get any food at all—the charges for it are exorbitant. When the section to Lake Tanganyika is completed only a millionaire can afford to enter the dining-car. It speaks volumes for the development of British South Africa, however, that one can get into a sleeping-car in Cape Town and get out of it again, six days later, on the navigable head-waters of the Congo, covering the distance of nearly two thousand five hundred miles at a total cost of eighty dollars—and much of it through a country which has been opened to the white man scarcely a dozen years.

Just as every visitor to the United States heads straight for Niagara, so every visitor to South Africa purchases forthwith a ticket to the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, the mighty cataract in the heart of Rhodesia which is the greatest natural wonder in the Dark Continent and, perhaps, in the world. The natives call the falls Mosi-oa-tunya, which means “Thundering Smoke,” and you appreciate the name's significance when your train halts at daybreak at a wayside station, sixty miles away, and you see above the tree-tops a cloud of smoky vapour and hear a low humming like a million sewing-machines. It is so utterly impossible for the eye, the mind, and the imagination to grasp the size, grandeur, and beauty of the Victoria Falls that it is futile to attempt to describe them. If you can picture an unbroken sheet of water forty city blocks in width, or as long as from the Grand Central Station, in New York, to Washington Square, hurtling over a precipice twice as high as the Flatiron Building, you will have the best idea that I can give you of what the Victoria Falls are like. They are unique in that the level of the land above the falls is the same as that below, the entire breadth of the second greatest river in Africa falling precipitately into a deep and narrow chasm, from which the only outlet is an opening in the rock less than one hundred yards wide. From the Boiling Pot, as this seething caldron of waters is called, the contents of the Zambezi rush with unbridled fury through a deep and narrow gorge of basaltic cliffs, which, nowhere inferior to the rapids at Niagara, extends with many zigzag windings for more than forty miles. My first glimpse of the falls was in the early morning, and the lovely, reeking splendour of the scene, as the great, placid river, all unconscious of its fate, rolls out of the mysterious depths of Africa, comes suddenly to the precipice's brink, and plunges in one mighty torrent into the obscurity of the cavern below, the rolling clouds of spray, the trembling earth, the sombre rain-forest on the opposite bank, and a rainbow stealing over all, made a picture which will remain sharp and clear in my memory as long as I live.

The Outer Lands are almost all exploited; the work of the pioneer and the frontiersman is nearly finished, and in another decade or so we shall see their like no more. Rhodesia is the last of the great new countries open to colonisation under Anglo-Saxon ideals of government and climatically suitable for the propagation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Though the handful of hardy settlers who have already made it their home speak with the burr of the shires instead of the drawl of the plains; though they wear corded riding-breeches instead of leather “chaps”; and stuff Cavendish into their pipes instead of rolling their cigarettes from Bull Durham, they and the passing plainsmen of our own West are, when all is said and done, brothers under their skins.

With the completion of the Cape-to-Cairo trunk line and its subsidiary systems to either coast, with the exploitation of the mineral deposits which constitute so much of Rhodesia's wealth, and with the harnessing of the great falls and the utilisation of the limitless power which will be obtainable from them, this virgin territory in the heart of Africa bids fair to be to the home and fortune seekers of to-morrow what the American West was to those of yesterday, and what northwestern Canada is to those of to-day. A few years more and it will be a developed and prosperous nation. To-day it is the last of the world's frontiers, where the hardy and adventurous of our race are still fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation.

THE COUNTRY OF BIG THINGS

THE most significant thing I saw in South Africa was an old-fashioned gabled, whitewashed house. The name of it is Groote Schuur, and it stands in very beautiful grounds on the slopes of Table Mountain, a mile or so at the back of Cape Town. That house was the home of Cecil John Rhodes, who, more than any other man, was responsible for the Boer War and for the resultant British predominance south of the Congo, and in his will he directed that it should be used as the official residence of the prime minister of that South African confederation which his prophetic mind foresaw. The welding of the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State with the British colonies of Natal and the Cape of Good Hope produced the great antipodal commonwealth of which the empire-builder dreamed, but the man who, as prime minister, dwells under Groote Schuur's gabled roof and directs the policies of the new nation is a member of that Boer race which Rhodes hated and feared and whose political power he firmly believed had been broken forever. Fortune never doubled in her tracks more completely than when she made General Louis Botha, the last leader of Boer troops in the field, the first prime minister of a united South Africa.

Strange things have happened in South Africa in the dozen years that have passed since the musketry crackled along the Modder and the Tugela, for the country that the world believed had been won for good and all by British arms is being slowly but surely rewon by Boer astuteness. Already the bonds which hold the new Union of South Africa to the British Empire have become very loose ones. The man who, as prime minister, is the virtual ruler of the young nation, is a far-sighted and sagacious Dutchman, while seven out of the eleven portfolios in his cabinet are held by men of the same race. The Union not only makes its own laws and fixes its own tariffs, but the leading Dutch organ of the country recently went so far as to urge that, in case Great Britain should become engaged in a European war, it would be possible and might be proper for South Africa to declare its neutrality and take no part in it. Not only is the white population of the Union overwhelmingly Dutch, but in many parts of the country English is becoming merely a subsidiary tongue, while it is not at all unlikely, in view of the bill recently passed by the Parliament making Dutch compulsory in the schools, that the language of the Netherlands will eventually become the predominant tongue throughout all South Africa. Most suggestive of all, perhaps, the Orange River Colony, upon entering the Union, promptly reverted to its old name of the Orange Free State, which it bore before the war with England. Indeed, it may sadly perplex the historians of the future to decide who won the Boer War.

If South Africa is to become a union in fact as well as in name its people will have to face and solve the great national problems of race and colour. Of these, the former are, if not the more important, certainly the more pressing. Two of the four provinces of the Union, remember, are British solely by right of conquest; a third is bound by the closest ties of blood and tradition to the Dutch people; while only one of the four is British in sentiment and population. Many intelligent people with whom I talked, both in England and in Africa, assured me that the formation of the Union was the first step toward cutting the bonds which join South Africa to the mother country. While most Englishmen scoff at any such suggestion, swaggeringly asserting that they “have whipped the Dutch once and can do it again,” the Dutch retort, on the other hand, that it took England, with all her financial and military resources, four years, and cost her tens of thousands of lives and millions of pounds, to conquer the two little Boer republics, and that she would not have beaten them then if their money had held out. Though there is certainly no love lost between the English and the Boers, I think that the majority of the latter are convinced that it is to their own best interests to be loyal to the new government, in the direction of which they have, after all, the greatest say.

The attitude which the British Government has adopted in its treatment of the Boer population since the close of the war has been remarkable for its generosity and far-sightedness. In all its colonial history it has done few wiser things than the recognition of the military, as well as the civic, ability of General Botha. Not only is this sagacious Dutchman, who led the forces of the embattled Boers until dispersed by the tremendously superior might of England, and then inaugurated a guerilla warfare by which the conflict was prolonged for two years with victories which will go down in history as notable, now prime minister of the new nation, but, early in 1912, he was appointed to the rank of general in that very army which he so long and so valorously defied. This is, I believe, an almost unprecedented instance of the wise and politic exercise of imperial authority in the strengthening of imperial power and can hardly fail to result in increasing the loyalty of South Africa's Boer population.

The men who planned and brought the Union into being have had to pick their steps with care, and more than once their ingenuity has been taxed to the utmost to avoid the outcropping of racial jealousies and enmities. The white population of South Africa, you should understand, consists of three classes: the Boers, which means simply “tillers of the soil,” and which is the name applied by the South African Dutch to themselves; the Colonials, or British immigrants, most of whom have come out with the intention of returning to England as soon as they have made their fortunes; and, lastly, the Africanders, men whose fathers were British immigrants, but who were themselves born and bred in South Africa and who have intermarried with the Boers so often that it is almost impossible to draw the line between the races. Given these three factions, therefore, with their different customs, ideals, and aspirations, and it needs no saying that the task confronting those who are responsible for the smooth working of the governmental machinery is no easy one. The political jealousy existing between Briton and Boer in South Africa to-day is comparable only to that which existed between Northerners and Southerners during reconstruction days. The racial antagonism which arose over the location of the Federal capital, and which threatened at one time to upset the whole scheme of federation, was only overcome by the novel expedient of creating two capitals instead of one, Pretoria, the old capital of the Transvaal, where Krüger held sway, being made the residence of the Governor-General and the seat of the executive power, while the Parliament sits in Cape Town.

The Union Parliament consists of a Senate having forty members—eight of whom are appointed by the Governor-General, the other thirty-two being elected, eight by each province—and a House of Assembly with 121 members chosen as follows: Cape of Good Hope 51, Natal 17, Transvaal 36, and Orange Free State 17. No voter is disqualified by race or colour, but the members of Parliament must be English subjects of European descent who have lived in the colony for at least five years. Now, a very great deal, so far as the well-being of the native races of South Africa are concerned, depends upon the interpretation that is given to the words “European descent.” In Cuban society every one who is not absolutely black is treated as white, whereas in the United States every one who is suspected of having even a “touch of the tar brush” is treated as black. Though the Federal constitution is very far from giving the native races a standing equal to that of the whites, intelligent government of the natives is promised by a clause which provides that four of the Senate, out of a total of forty, shall be appointed because of their special knowledge of the wants and wishes of the coloured population.

If the racial problem is the most pressing, the colour problem is by far the most serious question before the people of South Africa, for the blacks not only outnumber the whites four to one, but there is the ever-present danger that rebellion may spring up among them without the slightest warning. Apart from all other considerations, the very numbers of the natives in South Africa form a dangerous element in the problem, for there are close on five million blacks south of the Limpopo as against a million and a quarter Europeans. If, in our own South, where the blacks are only half as numerous as the whites, there exists a problem of which no satisfactory solution has been offered, how much more serious is the state of affairs in a country where a handful of white men—themselves split into two camps by racial and political animosities—are face to face with a vast, warlike, and constantly increasing native population! In fact, the colour problem which has arisen would be strikingly similar to that in our Southern States were it not that there is a vast difference in type and temperament between the South African native and the Southern darky. The native races are three in number: the Bushmen, the aborigines of South Africa, a race of pygmy savages of a very low order of intelligence, who are fast becoming extinct; the Hottentots, a people considerably more advanced toward civilisation but rapidly decreasing from epidemics; and the Kaffirs, as the various sections of the great Zulu race are commonly known, a warlike, courageous, and handsome people who, since the British Government ended their inter-tribal wars, are rapidly multiplying, having increased fifteen per cent in the last seven years. Although the Europeans in South Africa universally regard the Kaffirs with contempt, it is not altogether unmixed with fear, for a nation of fighting men, such as the Zulus, who organised a great military power, enacted a strict code of laws, and held the white man at bay for a quarter of a century, will not always remain in a state of subjection, nor will they tamely submit to being driven into the wilderness north of the Zambezi, a solution of the colour problem which has frequently been proposed.

That the attitude of Great Britain toward the colour question in South Africa is similar to that of the Northern States toward the same problem in the South, while the attitude of the European settlers is almost identical with that of the Southerners, is strikingly illustrated by a case which recently occurred in South Africa, in which a European jury found a native guilty of attempting to assault a white woman, a crime as unknown under the old régime in South Africa as it was in our own South before the Civil War. Though the judge sentenced the man to death, the Governor-General promptly commuted the sentence on the ground that the “fact of crime” had not been established. Immediately a storm of protest and indignation arose among the white population which swept the country from the Zambezi to the Cape, the settlers asserting that if the decree of commutation were to form a precedent, no white woman would be safe in South Africa. The echoes of this controversy had not yet died away before two other cases occurred which intensely aggravated the situation. One was the case of a settler named Lewis, who shot a native for an insult to his daughters, while the other was that of the Honourable Galbraith Cole, a son of the Earl of Enniskillen, who killed a native on the alleged charge of theft. Both men were tried by white juries on charges of murder, and both were promptly acquitted, though Mr. Cole, in spite of his acquittal, was deported from South Africa by the government. As though to emphasise their colour prejudice, the lawyers of the Union about this time took concerted action to prevent native attorneys from practising among them. How, then, can the natives, who form three fourths of the population of the new Union, and who are far more children of the soil than the Europeans, be said to have protection of their most elementary rights if they are to be debarred from having men of their own colour and race to defend them, and if no white jury can be trusted to do justice where a native is concerned?

The imperial government deserves the greatest credit, however, for the steps it has taken to preserve his lands to the native. In the native protectorates and reservations of Basutoland, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, Griqualand, Tembuland, and Pondoland the government has reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives territories considerably larger than the combined area of our three Pacific-coast States. Though these territories are under the control of British resident commissioners, the native chiefs are allowed to exercise jurisdiction according to tribal laws and customs in all civil matters between natives, special courts having been established to deal with serious civil or criminal matters in which Europeans are concerned. Though certain small areas of land in these rich territories are held by whites, the bulk of the country is reserved for the exclusive use and benefit of the natives, and it is not at all likely that any more land will be alienated for purposes of settlement by Europeans. (Could anything be in more striking contrast to our disgraceful treatment of the Indian?) Though South Africa has much in common with Canada, and with Australia, and with our own Southwest, it is, when all is said and done, a black man's country ruled by the white man, and it is upon the justice, liberality, and intelligence of this rule that the peace and prosperity of the young nation must eventually depend.

Two great obstacles will always stand in the way of the white man having an easy row to hoe in South Africa: the climate and the lack of water. Though the climate of the uplands is pleasant and makes men want to lead an outdoor life, I am not at all certain that it tends to develop or maintain the keenness and energy characteristic of dwellers in the north temperate zone. The climate of the coastal regions is, moreover, distinctly bad, the sharply cold nights and the misty, steaming days producing the coast fever, which is a combination of rheumatism, influenza, dysentery, and malaria, and is very debilitating indeed. The white man who intends to make his permanent home in South Africa has, therefore, two alternatives: he can submit to the exactions of the climate, take life easily, leave the black bottle severely alone, and live a long but unprogressive life, or he can exhaust his energies and undermine his health in fighting the climate and die of old age at sixty. If the climate is not all that is desirable for men, it is infinitely worse for animals, for every disease known to the veterinarian abounds. Time and again the herds of the country have been almost exterminated by the hoof-and-mouth disease, or by the rinderpest, a highly contagious cattle distemper which is probably identical with that “murrain” with which Moses smote the herds of ancient Egypt and which helped to bring Pharaoh to terms. In the low-lying regions along the East Coast, and in the country north of the Limpopo it is necessary to keep horses shut up every night until the poisonous mists and dew have disappeared before the sun lest they contract the “blue-tongue,” a disease characterised by a swollen, purplish-hued tongue which kills them in a few hours by choking; while in certain other districts, especially in the vicinity of the Zambezi and of the Portuguese territories, the deadly tsetse-fly makes it impossible to keep domestic animals at all.

The other great obstacle to the prosperity of South Africa is the lack of water, for less than one-tenth of the country is suitable for raising any kind of a crop without water being led onto it—and irrigation by private enterprise is out of the question, as even the indomitable Rhodes was forced to admit. The government is fully alive to the crying need for water, however, and a scheme for a national system of irrigation is filling a large part of the Ministry of Agriculture's programme. If carried out, this scheme will enormously enlarge the area of tillage, for some of the regions now hopelessly arid, such as the Karroo, have a soil of amazing fertility and need only water to make them produce luxuriant crops. Were the rains of the wet season conserved by means of the great tanks so common in India, or were artesian wells sunk like those which have transformed the desert regions of Algeria and Arizona, the vast stretch of the Karroo, instead of being yellow with sand, might be yellow with waving corn.

Though agriculture is, and probably always will be, the least important of the country's great natural sources of wealth, the development of rural industries is, thanks to governmental assistance, steadily progressing. Roads and bridges are being built, experimental farms organised on a large scale, the services of scientific experts engaged, blooded live-stock imported, agricultural banks established, and literature dealing with agricultural problems is being distributed broadcast over the country. The exports of fruit are steadily increasing; sugar is being grown on the hot lands of Natal and might be grown all the way to the Zambezi; tea has lately been introduced in the coastal regions and would probably also flourish in the north; the tobacco of the Transvaal is as good a pipe tobacco as any grown, and those who have become accustomed to it will use no other; with the exception of the olive, which does not thrive, and of the vine, which succeeds only in a limited area around Cape Town, nearly all of the products of the temperate zone and of subtropical regions can be grown successfully. Though South Africa unquestionably presents many promising openings in farming, in fruit-growing, and in truck gardening, it is folly for a man to attempt any one of them unless he possesses practical experience, a modest capital, and a willingness to work hard and put up with many inconveniences, for in no other English-speaking country are the necessities of life so dear and so poor in quality, nowhere is labour so unsatisfactory, and nowhere is lack of comfort so general.

South Africa's chief source of wealth is, and always will be, its minerals. It was, strangely enough, the latest source to become known, for nobody suspected it until, in 1867, a Boer hunter, his eye caught by a sparkle among the pebbles on the Orange River, picked up the first diamond. The diamonds found in that region since then have amounted in value to nearly a billion dollars. Fifteen years after the great diamond finds which sent the adventurers and fortune-seekers of the world thronging to South Africa, came the still greater gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand, or “The Rand,” as the reef of gold-bearing quartz in the Transvaal is commonly called. The total value of the gold production of the Rand for the twenty-five years ending in June, 1910, was nearly one and a half billion dollars. But though the Rand produces more gold than America and Australia put together; though Kimberley has a virtual monopoly of the world's supply of diamonds; though seams of silver, iron, coal, copper, and tin are only waiting for capital and skill to unlock their treasures, South Africa is, in the midst of this stupendous wealth, poor, for she is as dependent on foreign sources for her food supply as England. In other words, a region as large as all the States west of the Rocky Mountains, in which flourish nearly all the products of every zone from the Equator to the Pole, is unable to supply the wants of a white population which is less than that of Connecticut. In California, on the other hand, which is strikingly similar to South Africa in many respects, the cultivation of the land kept pace with the production of gold and eventually outstripped it. Until the mining industry of South Africa is likewise put upon a solid agricultural foundation, the country can never hope to be self-supporting.

In many respects Johannesburg, the “golden city,” is the most interesting place I have ever seen. In 1886 it was nothing but a collection of miserable shanties. To-day “Joburg,” as it is commonly called, is a city of a quarter of a million people, with asphalted streets, imposing office buildings, one of the best street-railway systems that I know, the finest hotel south of the Equator, and one of the most beautiful country clubs in the world. It is a city of contrasts, however, for you can stand under the porte-cochère of the palatial Carlton Hotel and hear the click of roulette balls, the raucous scrape of fiddles, and the shouts of drunken miners issuing from a row of gambling-hells, dance-halls, and gin palaces still housed in one-story buildings of corrugated iron; a beplumed and bepainted Zulu will pull you in a 'rickshaw, over pavements as smooth and clean as those of Fifth Avenue, to a theatre where you will have the privilege of paying Metropolitan Opera House prices to witness much the same sort of a performance that you would find in a Bowery music-hall; in the Rand Club you can see bronzed and booted prospectors, fresh from the mining districts of Rhodesia or the Congo, leaning over the bar, cheek-by-jowl with sleek, immaculately groomed financiers from London and Berlin and New York. Johannesburg is a spendthrift city, a place of easy-come and easy-go, for the mine-workers are paid big wages, the mine-managers receive big salaries, and the mine-owners make big profits, and they all spend their money as readily as they make it. The English miner averages five dollars a day, which he spends between Saturday night and Monday morning in a drunken spree, while a native labourer will save enough in a few months to keep him in idleness and his conception of comfort for the rest of his life.

There is pleasant society in Johannesburg and much hospitality to a stranger. I took nearly a score of letters of introduction with me to the Rand, but one would have done as well, for you present one letter, and at the dinner which the man to whom it is addressed promptly gives for you at the Rand Club or at the Carlton you will meet several of the other people to whom you bear introductions. Through their club life and their business relations the English and Americans in South Africa are linked together in acquaintance like rings in a shirt of chain-mail, so that if a man in Bulawayo or Kimberley or Johannesburg gets to living beyond his income, or loses heavily at cards, or pays undue attention to another man's wife, they will be discussing his affairs in the club bars or on the hotel verandas of Cape Town and Durban within a fortnight. I found that nearly all of the mines on the Rand are managed by Americans, and that the mine-owners, who are nearly all English or German, preferred them to any other nationality, which struck me as being very complimentary to the administrative and mechanical abilities of our people. One of these American mine-managers drove forty miles in his motor-car so as to shake hands with me, merely because he had learned in a roundabout way that I came from the same part of New York State as himself, while another fellow-countryman, who had made a great fortune during the Boer War by contracting to wash the clothes of the British army, and received war-time prices for his work, kidnapped me from the hotel where I was staying, and landed me, baggage and all, in his home, and actually felt affronted when I tried to leave after a week.

Few places could be more unlike Johannesburg than Pretoria, the new capital of the Union, only thirty miles away. It is as different from the “golden city” as sleepy Bruges is from bustling Antwerp; as Tarrytown, New York, is from Paterson, New Jersey. At first sight I was surprised to find so English a town, but after I had strolled in the shade of the wooden arcades formed by the broad verandas of the shops I decided that the atmosphere of the city was Indian; the rows of mud-bespattered saddle-horses tied to hitching-posts along the main streets and the rural produce being sold from wagons in the central market-place recalled our own West; but the substantial, white-plastered houses, with their old-fashioned stoeps, their red-brick sidewalks, and their prim and formal gardens, finally convinced me that the town was, after all, Dutch. Every visitor to Pretoria goes to see Krüger's house, the low, whitewashed dwelling with the white lions on the stoep, where the stubborn old President used to sit, smoking his long pipe and drinking his black coffee and giving parental advice to his people. Across the way is the old Dutch church where he used to hold forth on Sundays, with the gold hands still missing from the clock-face on its steeple, for in the last days of the South African Republic they were melted down and went to swell the slender war-chest of the Boer army. In the cemetery hard by the crafty, indomitable old man lies buried, while the hated flag against which he fought so long flies over the capital where he collected his guns and hatched his schemes of conquest, and within sight of his black-marble tomb there are rising in brick and stone the great new buildings which mark Pretoria as the capital of a united South Africa.

Thirty miles northward across the veldt from Pretoria is the great hole in the ground known as the Premier Diamond Mine, the newest and potentially the richest of the South African diamond fields. Here, in January, 1905, the surface manager, a Scotchman named McHardy, while strolling through the pit during the noon hour, saw the sparkle of what he at first took to be a broken bottle. Prying it loose with his stick from the surrounding rubble, he found it to be a diamond as large as a good-sized orange. This remarkable stone, which is the largest diamond heretofore found, has since become known to the world as the Great Cullinan, being named after Sir Thomas Cullinan, one of the owners of the mine. It is a pure white stone, 4 by 2¼ by 2 inches, weighing 3,025 carats, or 1.37 pounds, and worth in the neighbourhood of a million dollars. As the surface cleavage shows that it is undoubtedly a fragment of a much larger crystal, one cannot but wonder what the original stone was like. The Great Cullinan was immediately purchased by the Transvaal Government—or, rather, the mine's share was purchased, for the government receives sixty per cent of the value of all diamonds found—and presented to King Edward. The question then arose of how so valuable a gem could be transported to England in safety, for no sooner had its discovery been announced than the criminals of the world began to lay their plans to get possession of it. After many discussions and innumerable suggestions and much newspaper comment, four men, armed to the teeth, left the Premier Mine, carrying with them a red-leather despatch box. Crossing the thirty miles of veldt to Pretoria under heavy escort, they were conveyed in a private car to Cape Town; in the liner by which they took passage to England a safe had been specially installed and the red-leather despatch box was placed in it, two of the men remaining on duty in front of it night and day. From Southampton a special train took them up to London and a strong guard of detectives and police surrounded them on their way to the bank at which the diamond was to be delivered. When the despatch box was opened in the presence of a group of curious officials it was found to contain nothing more valuable than a lump of coal! The stone itself—and as Sir Thomas Cullinan told me the story it is undoubtedly true—was wrapped in cotton wool and tissue paper, put in a pasteboard box, wrapped up in brown paper, and sent to England by parcels post, not even the post-office authorities being given an inkling that it was in the mails. I almost forgot to mention, by the way, that McHardy, the discoverer of the great stone, was given a bonus of ten thousand dollars, though it is a sad and peculiar commentary that within a year his wife died, the bank in which he put the money failed, and his house burned down.

The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two layers: a soft, yellow clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard, blue clay, lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin stratum of calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud pits due to volcanic action, such as the boiling springs of the Yellowstone. Imagine a great hollow, looking like a gigantic bowl, perhaps half a mile in diameter and one hundred feet deep, enclosed by a series of barbed-wire fences and filled by thousands of Kaffir workmen, looking, from a distance, like a gigantic swarm of ants—such was my first impression of the Premier Mine. The native labourers, who work in three shifts of eight hours each, after cleaving the “hard-blue” with their picks, load it onto trolley-cars, which are attached to a cable and hauled to the surface of the pit, where it is spread on mile-long fields and exposed for several months to rain, wind, and sun so as to effect decomposition. The softened lumps of earth, after being brought into still smaller fragments by the pickaxe, are then sent to the mills, where they are crushed, pulverised, washed, and finally sent to the “greaser” to get at the stones. Until very recently men had to be employed to sort the washed “concentrates” and pick out the diamonds. But they would miss some. And the men had to be guarded lest they steal the gems. And detectives had to be hired to watch the guards who watched the men. But one day a mine employee named Kirsten happened to notice that the diamonds, no matter how small or discoloured, always stuck to a greasy surface, just as iron filings stick to a magnet, while the dirt and other stones did not. That was the suggestion which led to the invention of the “Kirsten greaser,” a series of sloping boards, heavily coated with grease, which are gently agitated as the mud and slime containing the diamonds are slowly washed over them, and which never fail to collect the precious stones.

At Kimberley, which is the only other diamond-producing district of any importance in South Africa, the gem-bearing ground extends over an area of but thirty-three acres, so that open mining has long since given way to shafts, which have now been sunk to a depth of two thousand five hundred feet, galleries being driven through the producing ground at every forty-foot level, precisely as in a coal mine. Kimberley has a romantic and picturesque history. In 1869 you could not have found its name upon the map. In the following year a Boer hunter, pitching his tent on the banks of the Orange River, chanced to pick up a glittering stone from among the pebbles. The news of his find making its way overland to Cape Town, the submarine cables flashed it to every quarter of the globe, so that within a twelvemonth adventurers and fortune-seekers had flocked there in tens of thousands. By 1871 sixteen hundred claims, each thirty-one feet square, were being worked, each man digging out the earth on his own small plot, carrying it to one side, pulverising it by hand, and sifting it for diamonds. The dirt from one claim would fall into a neighbouring one, while some miners could not get their dirt out at all without crossing another's property, so that quarrels and lawsuits and shooting affrays soon began. About this time two quiet, uncommunicative, shabbily clad men appeared at Kimberley and began to buy up the various claims, until, before any one really appreciated what was happening, the whole diamond industry of South Africa was in their hands. Those men were Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato, and the great amalgamation which their skill and shrewdness effected, now known as the DeBeers Consolidated Mining Company, was one of the greatest coups in the history of finance. It is this corporation which the women of the world have to blame for keeping up the price of diamonds, for the first thing it did was to close the greater part of the Kimberley mines, keeping just enough open to produce the amount of stones which experience has proved that Europe and America are able to take at a price high enough to leave a gratifying profit. Although, as a result of this policy, the price of diamonds has been well maintained, the population of Kimberley has been greatly reduced, the one great corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees and its labour-saving machinery, having taken the place of the horde of independent adventurers of the early days.

It struck me that by far the most interesting sights, both at the Kimberley and the Premier mines, were the so-called compounds, in which the native labourers are confined, for the native who hires out to work in a diamond mine must submit, during the term of his contract, to as close confinement as a convict in a penitentiary; he knows that he is in danger of being shot by the guards if he attempts to escape; he is prepared to be searched daily with the same minuteness which customs inspectors display in the case of a known smuggler; and when his contract expires he has still to put up with a fortnight's solitary confinement, in which emetics and cathartics play an unpleasant part. The mine compounds are huge enclosures, unroofed but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything being thrown out over the walls. Around the interior of the wall are rows of corrugated-iron huts, in which the natives live and sleep when they are not at work, while the open space in the middle is used for cooking, for washing, and for native games. The compounds are surrounded by three lines of barbed-wire fence which are constantly patrolled by armed sentries and illuminated at night by powerful search-lights; every entrance is as jealously guarded as that of a German fortress; and visitors are never admitted unless they bear a pass signed by the administration and are accompanied by a responsible official of the mine. Although the government—which, as I have already remarked, takes sixty per cent of the mine's earnings—has made I. D. B. (illicit diamond-buying) a penal offence with a uniform punishment of twenty years at hard labour, and though the mining companies maintain espionage systems which rival those of many Continental governments, no employee, from director down to day labourer, ever being free from scrutiny, millions of dollars' worth of diamonds are smuggled out of the mines each year. To encourage honesty, ten per cent of the value of any stone which a workman may find is given to him if he brings it himself to the overseer, well over a quarter of a million dollars being paid out annually on stones thus found.

The compound of the Premier Mine contained, at the time of my visit, something over twelve thousand natives, representing nearly every tribe from Pondoland to the head-waters of the Congo. Here one sees Zulus, Fingos, Pondos, Basutos, Bechuanas, Matabele, Mashonas, Makalaka, and even Bushmen from the Kalahari country and Masai from German East Africa, all attracted by the high wages, which range from five to eight dollars a week. When the native's six-month contract has ended, he takes his wages in British sovereigns—and his earnings accumulate quickly because he can live on very little—goes home to his own tribe, perhaps six weeks' journey away, buys a wife and a yoke of oxen, and lives lazily ever after. Not all of the natives are of so thrifty a turn of mind, however, for the company store holds many attractions for them and they are heavy purchasers of camel's-hair blankets, French perfumes, and imported cutlery, refusing almost invariably to take anything but the best.

I have tried to paint for you a comprehensive, though necessarily an impressionistic, picture of this great new nation that has sprung up so quickly in the antipodes, and to give you at least a rough idea of what its people, its soil, its towns, its climate, its resources, and its problems are like. That South Africa will always be a country of great mineral wealth there is little doubt, for, when the supplies of gold and diamonds are exhausted, copper, iron, and coal should still furnish good returns. Likewise, it will always be a great ranching country, for nearly all of its vast veldt is ideal, both in climate and pasturage, for live-stock. It will probably never become a manufacturing country, for coal is of poor quality, there is neither water power nor inland waterways, and labour is neither good nor cheap. If, as I have already remarked, government irrigation can be introduced as successfully as it has been in our own Southwest, and if the malaria which makes the rich coast-lands almost uninhabitable can be exterminated as effectually as we have exterminated it on the Isthmus of Panama, I can see no reason why South Africa should not eventually become one of the great agricultural countries of the world. Though many South Africans look forward to a day when the natives will begin to retire to the country north of the Zambezi, and when a large European population will till their own farms, by their own labour, with the aid of government-assisted irrigation, I am personally of the opinion that South Africa will never become at all evenly populated, but that it will always bear a marked resemblance to our Southwest, with large areas devoted to the raising of sheep and cattle, with certain other areas irrigated for the raising of fruit, and with its population centred for the most part in towns scattered at long distances from one another, but connected by rapid railway communications.

Everything considered, South Africa is a country of big things—big pay, big prices, big opportunities, big obstacles, big resources, big rewards—and she needs young men to help her fight her battles and solve her problems. So, if I were a youngster, with the sheep-skin of a technical or agricultural school in my pocket, a few hundred dollars in my purse, and a longing for fortune and adventure in my heart, I think that I should walk into one of those steam-ship offices in Bowling Green and book a passage for that land of which some one has said, “Fortune knocks at a man's door once in most countries, but in South Africa she knocks twice.”

THE FORGOTTEN ISLES

THERE can be no doubt about it: real cannibal kings are getting scarce. Ever since, as a youngster, I read of Du Chaillu's adventures among the man-eating natives of Equatoria, I had hankered to see a real live cannibal in the flesh. But when, in later years, I made inquiries about them from missionaries and traders and officials in Senegal and Uganda and Nyasaland, I invariably received the reply: “Oh, that's all over now; except among a few of the West Coast tribes, cannibalism is a thing of the past.” So when the captain of the little German cargo boat on which I was loitering up and down Africa's Indian seaboard remarked at breakfast one morning that he had decided to put in to Mahé, in the Seychelle group, and that I might care to pass the time while he was taking on cargo by visiting the colony of cannibal royalties who were in exile there, I felt that one of my boyhood dreams was to be realised at last.

Do you happen, by any chance, to have been to Mahé, in the Seychelles? No? Of course not. Then you must picture an emerald island dropped down in a turquoise sea. Peacock-coloured waves ripple on a silver strand, and this loses itself almost immediately in a dense forest of giant palms, which, mounting leisurely, dwindles and straggles and runs out in a peak of bare blue rock, which disappears, in turn, behind a great, low-hanging, purple heat cloud. To reach these delectable isles one must have time and patience a-plenty, for they lie far from the ocean highways and are visited by scarcely a dozen vessels, all told, each year. Draw a line straight across the Indian Ocean from Colombo to Zanzibar, and where that line intersects the equator are the Seychelles, mere specks in that expanse of ocean. Mahé, the largest of the group, is everything that a tropical island should be, according to the story-books, even to its inaccessibility, for, barring the French mail steamer which touches there every other month on its way to Madagascar, and an occasional German freighter or British tramp which drops in on its way from Goa to Kilindini, on the chance of picking up a cargo of copra, it is as completely cut off from the outside world as though it were in Mars.

I rather imagine that they are the loneliest people in the world, those score of men and women—English, French, and German—who constitute the entire white population of the islands. That is why they are so pathetically eager to welcome the rare visitors who come their way. Indeed, until I went to Mahé I never knew what hospitality really meant. When our anchor rumbled down under the shadow of the Morne Seychellois, and the police boat—its crew of negroes, with their flashing teeth and big, good-humoured faces, their trim, blue sailor suits and broad-brimmed straw wide-awakes, looking like overgrown children—had taken me ashore, I promptly found myself surrounded by the entire European population.

“I am the wife of the legal adviser to the Crown,” said a sweet-faced little Irishwoman. “My husband and I would be so pleased if you would come up to our bungalow for dinner. You can have no idea how good it seems to see a white face again.”

“Oh, I say, then you must promise to breakfast with me,” urged a tall young Englishman in immaculate white linen, who, it proved, was the superior judge of the colony. “You won't disappoint me, will you, old chap? I'm dying to hear what's going on in the world. And if you should have any magazines or newspapers that you could spare——”

But the government chaplain, wasting no time in words, fairly hustled me into a diminutive dog-cart and, amid the reproaches of his fellow-exiles, off we rattled behind the only horse on the island. The padre was not to monopolise me for long, however, for the little group of homesick exiles pursued us to his bungalow, where they settled me in a long cane chair, thrust upon me cheroots and whiskey-and-sodas, and listened breathlessly to the bits of world gossip for which I ransacked the pigeon-holes of my memory for their benefit. The newest songs, the most recent plays, the latest fashions, all the gossip of Broadway and Oxford Street and the Avenue de l'Opéra—they hung on my words with an eagerness that was pathetic.

“I hope you'll pardon us,” apologised my host, “but it's so seldom that we see a pukka white man out here that we quite forget the few manners we have left in our eagerness to learn what is going on at home—the little things, you know, that are not important enough to put in the cables and that they never think to put in the letters. Until you have lived in such a place as this, my friend, you don't know the meaning of that word 'home.'”

It is hot in the Seychelles; hot with a damp, sticky, humid, enervating heat which is unknown away from the Line. They tell a story in Mahé of an English resident who died from fever and went to the lower regions. A few days later his friends received a message from the departed. It said, “Please send down my blankets.” There are days in an American midsummer when indoors becomes oppressive; it is always oppressive in the Seychelles, in January as in August, at midnight as at noon. During the “hot season” it is overpoweringly so, for you live for six months at a stretch in a bath of perspiration and wonder whether you will ever know what it is to be cool again. “There are six hundred minutes in every hour of the hot weather,” the governor's wife remarked to me, “and not one of them bearable. Although,” she added, “after the mercury in your bedroom thermometer has climbed above one hundred and thirty, a few more degrees don't much matter.” In her bungalow, for the greater part of the day, the white woman in the Seychelles is as much a prisoner by reason of the heat as is a Turkish woman in a harem from custom. Having neither shopping, domestic duties, nor callers to occupy her, the only break in the day's terrible monotony comes at sunset, when every one meets every one else at the little club on the water-front which, with its breeze-swept verandas and its green croquet lawns and tennis courts, is the universal gathering-place between the hours of six and eight. An afternoon nap is universal—if the flies will allow it. Flies by day and mosquitoes by night are as wearing on European nerves as the climate, the beds being from necessity so smothered in mosquito netting that the air that gets within is as unsatisfactory as strained milk. In the hot weather a punkah is kept going all night—this huge, swinging fan, pulled by a coolie who squats in the veranda outside, and who can go to sleep without ceasing his pulling, being as necessary for comfort as a pillow—while, during the hottest nights, it is customary to sleep unclad and uncovered, save for a sheet, which the punkah-coolie, slipping in every hour, sprinkles with water.

The white woman in this part of the world is an early riser. A cup of tea is always served her when she is awakened, and as soon as she is dressed comes chota hazri, or the little breakfast, consisting of tea, toast, eggs, and fruit. The most is made of the cool hours of the morning, for in the hot weather it is customary to “shut up the bungalow” at about seven A. M., when the temperature is moderately low compared with what it will rise to a few hours later. Every door and window is closed and thereafter the greatest care is taken to make entrances and exits as quickly as possible, for a door left open for any length of time quickly raises the temperature. If kept carefully closed, however, it is remarkable how cool the room keeps as compared with the stifling heat without.

Though a Seychellian bungalow is generally barn-like without and barren within, its European mistress usually contrives to make its rooms pretty and inviting, it being astonishing what marvels of transformation can be accomplished by means of native mattings, Indian printed curtains, and furniture of Chinese wicker, all effective and ridiculously cheap. The kitchen is a detached building, erected as far away from the bungalow as possible, and the white woman who knows when she is well off seldom enters it. Once a month, however, she inspects her cooking pots and pans, because, being made of copper, they have to be periodically tinned or they become poisonous, almost as many lives being lost in the tropics by the neglect of this simple precaution as by failure to have every drop of drinking water boiled. As there is no ice-making plant in the Seychelles, water is cooled for drinking by being placed in a porous earthenware vessel and swung to and fro in the heated atmosphere until, though still far from cool, it is a little less tepid and nauseous.

But the European residents are not the only exiles in the Seychelles, nor, to my way of thinking, the ones most to be pitied, for of recent years these islands, presumably because of their very remoteness, have been turned into a political prison for those deposed cannibal kings whose kingdoms have, on one excuse and another, been added to the dominions of the British Crown. At present there are three political prisoners of note on the island of Mahé—King Kabanga of Uganda, King Assibi of the Gold Coast, and King Prempeh of Ashantee. Though all of these ebony royalties were enthusiastic patrons of the cooking-pot, King Prempeh is by far the most notorious and the most interesting personality of the three, for it was his palace at Kumasi that was built of the skulls and surrounded by a neat picket fence made from the leg and arm bones of the people he and his tribesmen had eaten. Hard by the palace was the ghastly “crucifixion grove” where the victims were slaughtered and their bodies hung until sufficiently gamy to suit the royal palate. Owing to an error of judgment in selecting a British commissioner as the pièce de résistance for one of his feasts, an expedition was sent to Ashantee, the country annexed to the British empire, and its ruler forced to exchange his skull-walled palace in Kumasi for a four-roomed, tin-roofed cottage in the outskirts of Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, where, surrounded by the huts of the chieftains who accompanied him into exile, he lives on the meagre pension granted him by the British Government.

Clad in the flaming cotton robe of red and yellow which is the West African equivalent of royal ermine, worn over a pair of very soiled pajamas, his Majesty received me on the veranda of his little dwelling in the presence of the constable who guards him and who acts as interpreter when the King's scanty store of English gives out. Now I am not an entire stranger to the ways of the Lord's Anointed, but this audience with Prempeh of Ashantee was one of the most memorable experiences that I can recall. In the first place, the mercury had crept up and up and up until it hovered in the neighbourhood of one hundred and thirty degrees in the shade of the house; in the second place, the sons of the King (he told me that he had forty-two in all) had crowded into the tiny room until the place fairly reeked with the smell of perspiration; in the third place, I was at a loss what to talk to his Majesty about. The questions which one would like to ask a cannibal king are obvious—whether he takes his meat rare or well done, whether he prefers the tenderloin or the sirloin, whether he likes white meat better than black—but Prempeh of Ashantee is not at all the sort of person with whom one would feel inclined to take liberties, and I was very far from being sure whether he would consider such questions as liberties or not. After an awkward pause, during which the King shuffled his feet uneasily and I wiped away rivulets of perspiration, he said something in Ashantee—at least I suppose it was Ashantee—to one of his attendants, who shortly returned with a tin tray holding a bottle of whiskey, a siphon of lukewarm seltzer, and a couple of very dirty glasses. After another long and uncomfortable pause, the King asked me if I wouldn't have something to drink. Taking it for granted that Prempeh's capacity for drink would be as outré as his choice of food, I poured his beer glass full to the brim with whiskey, giving to myself the drink sanctioned by civilised custom.

“In my country,” said the King, leaning forward and speaking in the broken English which he had acquired from the government chaplain, “bad men sometimes try to poison king, so king turn drinks other way round,” and, suiting the action to the words, he turned the tray so as to place before me the beer-glassful of whiskey. I have never been quite certain whether there was a twinkle in the eye of that simple-hearted cannibal when he literally turned the table on me or not.

At the time of my visit to Prempeh he was in the throes of marital unhappiness, the details of which he confided to me. It seems that for several years past he had been endeavouring to gain admission to the Church-of-England fold, arguing, plausibly enough, that such a proof of his complete regeneration might result in inducing the British Government to send him back to his home in Ashantee. Working on that assumption, he had, not long before, asked the government chaplain to confirm him, to which request that gratified but still somewhat sceptical clergyman had replied: “I am sorry to say that what your Majesty asks is at present impossible, as your Majesty's marital affairs are not pleasing to the church.”

So Prempeh, who had brought only twelve of his wives with him into exile, thinking that the church held such a number to be incompatible with his dignity,—for the workings of the West African mind are peculiar, remember,—sent a message to the governor of the Seychelles asking permission to take a maiden of Mahé for his thirteenth spouse, and it was not until the indignant chaplain remonstrated with him for his fall from grace that he grasped the fact that Christianity demands of its converts the minimum instead of the maximum number of wives.

“So me ship three wives back Africa,” Prempeh explained to me in his quaint West Coast English. “Now me have only nine. Nine wives not many for great king. But if chappy [chaplain] not let me in church with nine wives, then me ship them back Africa too, for me very much homesick to see Ashantee.”

Poor, deposed, exiled, homesick king, he will never again see that African home for which he longs, I fear, for he cost England far too much in lives and money. He came out on the veranda of his little house to say good-by, and as I looked back, as my 'rickshaw boy drew me swiftly down the road, he was still standing there waving to me—a real, dyed-in-the-wool cannibal king, who has killed and eaten more human beings, I suppose, than almost any man that ever lived.

Two days' steam southward from the Seychelles, and midway between the island of Mahé and Diégo-Suarez, on the north coast of Madagascar, lies the islet of Saint Pierre, whence comes much of the guano with which we fertilise our flower-beds and gardens, and those giant sea-turtles whose shells supply our women-folk with fans, combs, and brooches. Here, on this half a square mile of sun-baked rock in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Scotch manager of the syndicate which works the guano deposits lives the whole year round, during half of which time he sees no human face, during the other half having the company of a few score blacks who are brought over from Mahé under contract to gather the rich deposits of guano. His only shelter a wooden shack, his only companions the clouds of clamorous sea-fowl, his only fresh food turtles and fish, his only communication with the world two times a year when the workers come and go, I expected to find him unshaven and slovenly, the most exiled of all exiles, the loneliest of the lonely. I made up a bundle of two-months-old newspapers and pictured the pleasure it would give him to learn the news of that big, busy, teeming world which lay over there beyond the rim of the Indian Ocean. I imagined that he would cling to my arm and beg piteously for news from home, and I thought it quite possible that he might weep on my shoulder. But when a crew of blacks had taken me through the booming surf in a tiny native dugout, and I and my bundle of newspapers had been hauled up an overhanging cliff at the end of a rope, I found the poor exile whose lonely lot I had come to cheer immaculate in white linen and pipe-clayed shoes and wholly contented with the shade of a green palm, the murmur of a turquoise sea, a book of Robert Burns's verses, and the contents of a large black bottle.

When De Lesseps, that lean Frenchman with the vision of a prophet and the energy of a Parisian, drove his spade through the sands of Suez and thereby shortened the sea-road from Europe to the East by five thousand miles, he gave France her revenge on Saint Helena. Ever since Clive won England her Indian empire, this obscure rock in the South Atlantic had been a prosperous half-way house on the road to the Farther East, its lonely islanders driving a roaring trade with the winged fleets of war and commerce that stopped there long enough to replenish their larders and refill their casks. But when the completion of the Canal altered the trade routes of the world, the tedious Cape journey was abandoned, the South Atlantic was deserted, and Saint Helena was ruined. By the genius of one of her sons, France had settled her score with that grim island, whose name still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of Frenchmen.

He who would see the prison place of the great Emperor for himself must be rich in time and patience, for the vessels that earn their government subsidy by grudgingly dropping anchor for a few hours in Jamestown's open roadstead are only indifferently good and very far between. Scarcely larger than the island of Nantucket—or Staten Island, if that conveys more meaning; almost midway between the fever-haunted coasts of Angola and Brazil; sixteen days' steam from Southampton Water and seven from Table Bay; its rockbound coasts as precipitous and forbidding as the walls of the Grand Canyon; and with a population less than that of many of New York's down-town office buildings, Saint Helena possesses one attraction, nevertheless, which more than repaid me for the long and arduous journey. That attraction is a mean and lonely cottage, set on a bleak and barren hill. To stand within the walls of that wretched dwelling and to stare out across the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hilltop, I travelled twenty thousand miles, for on that distant stage was played the last act of the mightiest tragedy of modern times.

Loitering up and down the seven seas, I have seen many islands, but none, that I can recall, that turns toward the seafarer a face at once so gloomy and so forbidding. It needs no vivid imagination, no knowledge of its history, to transform the perpendicular cliffs of Saint Helena into the grim walls of a sea-surrounded prison. It is a place so stern, so solemn, and so awesome that it makes you shiver in spite of yourself. As I leaned over the rail of a Castle steamer, with sunrise still an hour away and the Cross flaming overhead, and watched the island's threatening profile loom up out of the night, I shuddered in sympathy with that stern, cold man who came as a prisoner to these same shores close on a century ago.

From the view-points of safety and severity, the captors of the fallen Emperor could not have chosen better. For the safe-keeping of a man whose ambitions had decimated, bankrupted, and exhausted the people of a continent, it was imperative that a prison should be found whence escape or rescue would be out of the question by reason of its very isolation and remoteness. Twelve hundred miles from the nearest continental land, and that a savage and fever-infested wilderness; with but a single harbour, and that so poor that landing there is perilous except in the very best of weather; its great natural strength increased by impregnable forts; its towering rocks commanding a sea view of sixty miles in every direction, thus obviating the possibility of a surprise attack, Saint Helena admirably fulfilled the requirements for a prison demanded by a harassed, weakened, and frightened Europe.

Though those travellers who take passage by the slow and infrequent “intermediate” steamers to the Cape are usually afforded an opportunity of setting foot on Saint Helena's soil, the brief stay which is made there permits of their doing little else. As the house occupied by Napoleon stands in the very heart of the island and on its highest point, and as the road which leads to it is so rough and precipitous that those who hire one of the few available vehicles generally walk most of the way out of pity for the horses, there is rarely time for the traveller who intends proceeding by the same boat to set eyes on the spot which gives the island its fame. I heard, indeed, of scores of travellers who had chosen the discomforts of this roundabout and tedious route for the express purpose of visiting the house where Napoleon died, and who found, on arriving at Saint Helena, that they would have time for nothing more than a hurried promenade in the town. Nor are any efforts made by the indolent islanders to induce travellers to stay over a steamer, for there are neither hotels nor boarding-houses, and a visitor would have to depend for his bed and board on the hospitality of some private family.

The South Atlantic, her bosom rising and falling lazily under the languorous influence of the tropic morning, had exchanged her sombre night robe for a shimmering, sparkling garment of sun-flecked blue before the sleepy-eyed quarantine officer had laboriously climbed the port ladder; and the yellow flag at our masthead, fluttering down, had signalled to the clamorous crews of negroes waiting eagerly alongside that they could take us ashore. In the pitiless light of the early morning the island looked even more forbidding than when the harshness of its features was veiled by night. Naked slope and ridge rose everywhere, and everywhere they were cut and cross-cut by equally bare valleys and ravines, but not a house, not a tree, not a sign of life, vegetable or animal, could we detect as we drew near. Even the sea-birds seemed afraid to alight on those grim cliffs, darting in on outspread wings as though to settle on them, only to wheel away with frightened, discordant cries, the while an everlasting surf hurled itself angrily against the smooth black rocks, voicing its impotence in a sullen, booming roar.

Approaching the shore, we were amazed to see that what had appeared from the ship's deck to be a solid, perpendicular wall of rock was split in the middle, as though by a mighty chisel, and in the cleft thus formed nestled Jamestown, the island's capital, flanked on either side by towering, fort-crowned cliffs which effectually conceal it from the sea. Landing at the same stone water-stairs where the captive Emperor had come ashore nearly a century before, we followed a stone-paved causeway, bordered on the land side by a deep but empty moat, over a creaking drawbridge, through an ancient portcullised gateway, and so into a spacious square, shaded by many patriarchal trees and dotted here and there with groups of antiquated cannon. Bordering the square are the post-office, which does a thriving business in the sale of the rare surcharged stamps of the islands when the steamers come in; the custom-house, the law courts, the yellow church of Saint James, and the castle, a picturesque and straggling structure, begun by the first English governor in 1659, which is used by the governor for his “town” residence, though his “country” place is barely a mile away. The town itself is simply a mean and straggling street, lined on either side by whitewashed, red-roofed, green-shuttered houses which become less and less pretentious and more and more scattered as you make your way up the ever narrowing valley until it loses itself in the hills. If there is a more dead-and-alive place than Jamestown I have yet to see it. A New Hampshire hamlet on a Sunday morning is positively boisterous in comparison. Once a month, however, when the British mail comes in, the town arouses itself long enough to go down to the post-office and get the letters and the papers—especially the illustrated weeklies—from that far-off place which every islander, even though he was born and raised on Saint Helena, refers to as “home.”

From the very edge of the village square the cliff known as Ladder Hill rises sheer, its great bulk throwing an ominous shadow over the little town. It takes its name from the Jacob's ladder whose seven hundred wooden steps will bring you, panting and perspiring, to the fort and the wireless station which occupy the top. I suppose there is no other such ladder in the world, it being, so I was proudly assured by the islanders, nine hundred and ninety-three feet long and six hundred and two feet high. Nor can I conceive of any other place wanting such an accommodation, for those who use it are constantly in danger of bursting their lungs going up or of breaking their necks coming down.

A biscuit's throw from the foot of the ladder, and facing the public gardens, stands the sedate, old-fashioned house where Napoleon spent the first few nights after his arrival on the island. It is a prim, two-story residence, the sombreness of its snuff-coloured plaster relieved by white stone trimmings and window-sills—just such a place, in fact, as the British colonists built by the hundreds in our own New England towns. By one of the most remarkable coincidences of which I have ever heard, Napoleon was given the same bedroom which had been occupied by the Duke of Wellington—then Sir Arthur Wellesley—on his homeward voyage from India only a few years before.

Leaving Jamestown in its gloomy, rock-walled ravine, we followed the incredibly rough high-road which bumps and jolts and twists and turns and climbs back and up onto the table-land which forms, as it were, the roof of the island. The deeper we penetrated into the interior the more luxuriant the vegetation became. The dry, barren, soilless, lichen-coated rocks of the coast zone gave way to grassy valleys abloom with English gorse and broom and dotted with the bright green of willows and the dark green of firs, and these merged, in turn, into a land of bamboos and bananas, of oranges and lemons and date-palms, where the vegetation was so luxuriant and tropical as to give it almost the appearance of a botanic garden. I know, indeed, of no other place in the world where one can pass through three distinct zones of vegetation in the course of an hour's drive, the first few miles into the interior of Saint Helena being, so far as the scenery is concerned, like a journey from the rocky, desolate shores of Labrador, through the pine forests and fertile farm-lands of New England and New York, and so southward into the essentially tropical vegetation of lower Florida.

The road wound on and on, uncovering new beauties at every turn. Cheerful, low-roofed bungalows peeped out at us from gardens ablaze with camelias, fuchsias, and roses; through the vistas formed by fig, pear, and guava orchards we caught glimpses of prosperous-looking stone farm-houses whose thick walls and high gables showed that they dated from the Dutch occupation; passing above a tiny sylvan valley, our driver pointed out the rambling Balcombe place, where the Emperor lived for some weeks while Longwood was being prepared for his occupancy, and in the box-bordered gardens of which he made quiet love to his host's pretty daughter. In the same valley, not a pistol-shot away, are the whitewashed, broad-verandaed quarters of the Eastern Telegraph Company's force of operators—tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and a swimming-pool set in a lawn of emerald velvet serving to make the enforced exile of these young Englishmen, who relay the news of the world between Europe and the Cape, a not unpleasant one.

Steeper and steeper became the road; scantier and less luxuriant the vegetation, until at last we emerged upon a barren, wind-swept table-land. A farm-yard gate barred our road, but at the impatient crack of the driver's whip a small brown maiden hastened from a near-by lodge to open it, curtseying to us prettily as we rattled through. Three minutes' drive across a desolate, gorse-covered moor, and our driver pulled up sharply at a gate in a scraggy privet hedge surrounding just such a ramshackle, weather-beaten farm-house as you find by the hundreds scattered along the coast of Maine. “Longwood,” he remarked laconically, pointing with his whip. Convinced that I could not have heard aright, I asked him over again, for, despite all the accounts I had read of the mean surroundings amid which the Emperor ended his days, I could not bring myself to believe that this miserable cottage, with its sunken roof and lichen-coated walls, could have sheltered for more than half a decade the conqueror of Europe, the master of the Tuileries and Fontainebleau and Versailles, the man whose troopers had stabled their horses in every capital of the Continent.

Longwood House is an old-fashioned, rambling cottage, only one story high, unless you count the quarters improvised for the members of the Emperor's suite in the garret, which were lighted by means of small windows cut in the shingle roof. The house is built in the form of a T, the entrance, which is reached by four or five stone steps and a tiny latticed veranda, being represented by the bottom of the letter, while the dining-room, kitchens, and offices are represented by the top. Originally the dwelling of a peasant farmer, at the time Napoleon reached the island it was being used as a sort of shooting-box by the lieutenant-governor, the present front of the house being hastily added to form a reception-room for the Emperor. In addition to this salle de réception, where you are asked to sign the visitor' book by the old French soldier who is the official guardian of the place, there is a drawing-room, a dining-room, the Emperor's study, his bedroom, bath, and dressing-room—all small, ill-lighted, damp, and cheerless. Practically the entire lower floor of the house was used by Napoleon, the members of his entourage—marshals, ministers, and courtiers, remember, who were accustomed to the life of the most brilliant court in Europe—being accommodated in tiny, unventilated cubby-holes directly under the eaves. With the exception of two or three small pier-glasses, the house is now quite destitute of furniture, though in other respects it is kept religiously as it was in Napoleon's time, even the faded blue wall-paper, sprinkled with golden stars, having been carefully preserved. On the walls of the various rooms are notices in French and English indicating the purposes to which they were put during the imperial occupancy. Between two windows of the reception-room, where the Emperor's bed was removed from his bedroom a few days before his death because of the better light, stands a marble bust made from the cast taken immediately after his death, which, barring the one made by Canova during his life, is the only likeness of Napoleon admittedly correct. Without the house is the small and unkept garden in which the Emperor walked and sometimes worked, the arbour under which he spent so many hours, and the cement-lined fish-pond which he built with his own hands. Inside or out, there is not one suggestion of colour, of comfort, or of cheer: it is a prison-house and nothing more.

Near the bottom of the brown and windy hill on which Longwood stands is Geranium Valley, which contains the tomb, or rather the cenotaph, of the Emperor. It was by Napoleon's own wish that his body was buried in this exquisite spot, close beside the spring at which he so often used to drink and amid the wild geraniums of which he was so fond. The famous willow-tree still overshadows the little grave-space, which is enclosed by a high iron railing and a carefully trimmed hedge of box, while masses of flowers give brightness to a spot hallowed by many memories, for it was in this shady glen that the Emperor passed the most peaceful hours of his exile and it was here that he rested for twenty years until France brought him back in triumph to his final resting-place under the great gilt dome of Les Invalides.

Longwood House. “This miserable cottage, with its sunken roof and lichen-coated walls, sheltered for more than half a decade the conqueror of Europe.”

Looking northward across the Atlantic from Longwood. “To stare out across the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hilltop I travelled twenty thousand miles.”

THE PRISON PLACE OF A GREAT EMPEROR.

Both Longwood and the grave occupy the peculiar position of being French territory in the heart of a British colony, for half a century ago Queen Victoria presented the property to the French nation, an official appointed by the French Government residing on and caring for the place and showing it with mingled pride and sadness to the few visitors who make their way to this one of the world's far corners. It was an interesting but gloomy experience, that pilgrimage to the prison place of the great Emperor, for it visualised for me, as nothing else ever could do, the sordidness, the humiliations, and the mental tortures which marked the last years of Napoleon. As my vessel steamed steadily northward across the Atlantic, with the boulevards of Paris not three weeks away, I leaned over the taffrail and, staring back at the receding cliffs of that grim island, I seemed to see the short, stoop-shouldered, gray-coated, cock-hatted figure of the Emperor staring wistfully out across those leagues of ocean toward France.

To locate the next of these “Forgotten Isles,” and the most completely forgotten of all of them, you had better get out the family atlas and, with a ruler and a pencil, do a little Morris-chair exploring. Draw a line due south from Cape Verde, which is the westernmost point of Africa, and another line due east from Cape San Roque, which is the easternmost point in South America, and where those two lines meet, out in the wastes of the South Atlantic, you will find a barren rock which resembles, as, indeed, it is, an extinct and partially submerged volcano. This rock, which is considerably smaller than its sister island of Saint Helena, seven hundred miles away, is officially designated by the British Government as H.M.S. “Ascension.” Entirely under the control and jurisdiction of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, it is unique in that it is the only island in the world which has the rating of a man-o'-war, being garrisoned, or rather manned, by a detachment of sailors and marines, and being administered in every respect as though it were a unit of the British navy. With the exception of a dozen acres of vegetable garden, there is not a single green thing on the island—grass, shrub, or tree. The island of Saint Pierre, of which I made mention earlier in this chapter, is bad enough, goodness knows, but it at least has a palm-tree. Ascension hasn't even that. How they get men to go there is altogether beyond my comprehension. If I had to take my choice between being sentenced to exile on Ascension (which Heaven forbid!) or confinement in Sing Sing, I rather think I should choose the prison. There are people on Ascension, nevertheless, the population, which consists of officers, seamen, and marines, together with a handful of cable operators and a score of Kroo boys from Sierra Leone, numbering in all about one hundred and thirty. There were also four women—relatives of the officers—on the island when I was there. They had been there only six months, I was told, yet when our vessel arrived not one of them was on speaking terms with the others. Ascension, is, however, one of the most flourishing “match factories” in the British empire, it being safe to say that any unattached female, no matter what her disqualifications, can get a husband in a week's stay on the island. A young Englishman and his bride boarded our boat at Ascension. She had been born and had spent all of her life on Saint Helena (which is not exactly a roaring metropolis itself), and had married one of the cable operators stationed at Ascension, who was taking her on her first visit to the outside world. She told me that the event of her life, her marriage excepted, had been going out to a vessel to see a motor-car which was being transported to Cape Town. Here was an educated and intelligent English girl who had come to womanhood without ever having seen a railway train, a street-car, a building over two stories high, or a crowd of more than five hundred people. When we reached Teneriffe, in the Canaries, which is about as somnolent a place as any I know, her husband took her ashore to see the sights with keen anticipation. She rode on an electric car, she took tea in a four-story hotel, she attended a moving-picture show—and was brought back to the steamer suffering from violent hysterics. A week later we reached Southampton, where she was so completely prostrated by the roar and bustle of her first city that she had to go to bed under medical attention.

To those British officials and soldiers who are performing the manifold duties of empire along Africa's fever-stricken West Coast, the island of Ascension is a godsend, for an excellent sanatorium has been built by the government on its highest point, and to it come wasted, sunken-cheeked, fever-racked skeletons from all parts of that coast of death to build up their strength before going back to their work again. Not only is Ascension a coaling, cable, and health station of considerable importance, but it is also the chief habitat of the sea-turtle, which comes there in thousands between January and May, to lay its eggs in the sand. After having seen the enormous size these creatures attain, it is almost possible to believe some of those fantastic yarns about his trained turtles with which Baron de Rougemont set Europe gasping a few years back. During the year that I visited Ascension more than two hundred turtles were captured, ranging in weight from five hundred to eight hundred pounds apiece. Four of the monsters, each weighing close to half a ton, were put aboard our vessel, being sent by the officers of the garrison as a gift to his Majesty the King. They must have had turtle soup at Buckingham Palace for several days in succession after those turtles arrived.

It could not have been long after daybreak when a frousy-headed Greek steward awoke me with an intimation that we were off Canea. The evil-smelling mixture which was called coffee only by courtesy, and which was really chicory in disguise, held no attraction for me, for, through the port-holes of the dining-saloon I could see, rising from a sapphire sea, the green-clad, snow-capped mountains of Crete, the island of mythology and massacre.

Our little steamer forged ahead at half-speed and the white town kept coming nearer and nearer, until we could distinguish the caiques in the harbour, and the queer, narrow houses with their latticed harem windows which encircled it, and the white mosque with a palm-tree silhouetted against its slender minaret, and even the crowd of ebony, tan, and coffee-coloured humanity that fought for posts of vantage at the water-stairs. It was a picture of sunshine and animation, of vivid colours and strange peoples, such as one seldom sees except in some gorgeously staged comic opera, and as I surveyed it sleepily from the steamer's deck I had a momentary feeling that I was only an onlooker at a play and that the curtain would go down presently and I should have to go out into the drab, prosaic, humdrum world again.

But even as this was in my mind a gun boomed out from a crumbling bastion and five little balls ran up five flagstaffs which I had already noticed standing all in a row on the uppermost ramparts and had mistaken, naturally enough, for some new form of Marconi apparatus. The five little balls broke out into five flags and the morning breeze caught up their folds and held them straight out as though for our benefit, so that we could make them out quite plainly. Four of them were old friends that I had known on many seas—the Union Jack and the Tricolour and the Saint Andrew's cross of Russia and the red-white-and-green banner of Italy—but the fifth flag, which flew somewhat higher than the others, was of unfamiliar design; but the blood-red square of bunting, traversed by the Greek cross and bearing in its upper corner the star of Bethlehem, told its own story and I knew it for the flag of Crete. And I knew that there was deep significance in the design of that unknown flag and in the position of the four familiar ones that flew below it, for they signalled to the world that the Turk had been driven out, never to return; that Christianity had triumphed over Mohammedanism, and that the cross had, indeed, replaced the crescent; that the centuries of massacre were now but memories; that peace, in the guise of foreign soldiery, had, for a time at least, found an abiding-place in Crete; and, most significant of all, that the new flag with its single star would be upheld, if necessary, by the mightiest array of bayonets and battle-ships in Christendom.

The island of Crete, which is about the size of Porto Rico, not only occupies a very important strategical position, being nearly equidistant from the coasts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, commanding every line of communication in the eastern Mediterranean, and being within easy striking distance of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Canal, but it is also one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, or would be if the warring elements among its population would permit the rattle of the harvester to replace the rattle of the machine-gun. Ever since the Turks wrested the island from the Venetians, close on two and a half centuries ago, its history has been one of corruption, cruelty, and massacre. Almost annually, for more than seventy years, the island Christians rose in rebellion against their Turkish masters, and just as regularly the Turks suppressed those rebellions with a severity which turned the towns of the island into shambles and its fertile farm-lands into a deserted wilderness. The cruelty which coupled the name of Turk with execration in Armenia and Macedonia assumed such atrocious forms in Crete that finally the great powers were aroused to action, and in 1898 the fleets of England, France, Italy, and Russia dropped anchor in Suda Bay, the Turkish officials were forcibly deported, and a board of admirals assumed control of the affairs of the unhappy island. After a few months of martial government, during which the admirals squabbled continuously among themselves, the intervening powers proclaimed the island an autonomous state, subject to the Porte, but paying no tribute, and ruled by a high commissioner to be appointed by the King of the Hellenes. Though theoretically independent, it was provided that all questions concerning the foreign relations of Crete should be determined by the representatives of the powers, who would also maintain in the island, for a time at least, an international army of occupation. Recent events in the Balkans having resulted in bringing about an agitation in Crete for annexation to Greece, where a propaganda has long been vigorously carried on with that end in view, the protecting powers have definitely announced that the administration of the island will be continued by the “constituted authorities” (this should read “self-constituted”) until the question can be settled with the consent of Turkey. As things stand at present, the withdrawal of the international troops from Crete is about as distant as the withdrawal of the British garrisons from Egypt. To tell the truth, each of the protecting powers is exceedingly anxious to get the island for itself—England because it forms an admirable half-way house between Gibraltar and the Canal; France because its occupation would carry French influence into the eastern end of the Mediterranean; Italy because it would serve as a connecting link between the peninsula and Tripolitania; and Russia because it would give her the command of the entrance to the Dardanelles—and hence, though they will certainly never restore it to Turkey, they are far from anxious to hand it over to Greece, to whom, after all, it belongs historically, geographically, and ethnologically. As a result, the Cretan question will probably disturb the chancelleries of Europe for some years to come.

As I strained my eyes across the sparkling waters in vain search for signs of a hotel and breakfast, a boat flying the port-captain's flag and manned by gendarmes—splendid, muscular fellows with high boots and bare knees and baggy Turkish trousers, their keen brown faces peering out from under their fluttering cap-covers—came racing out from shore. As it came alongside the crew tossed oars with all the smartness of man-o'-war's-men; the white-clad officer in the stern, who was very stout and very stiffly starched, climbed the stairs gingerly, as though fearful of injuring the faultless crease in his linen trousers, and, after the exchange of ceremonious bows and laboured compliments in French, informed me that the High Commissioner had placed the boat at my disposal. There is always something peculiarly satisfying to the soul about going ashore under official auspices, not only because of the envious glances of your fellow-passengers who line the rail, but because of the powerlessness of the customs officials to annoy you.

Canea, which is the seat of government, is the most picturesquely cosmopolitan place west of Suez. It has a mild and equable climate; living is cheap and reasonably good; there is a large garrison of foreign soldiery; there are no extradition treaties in force; and trouble of one kind or another is always brewing. Like a magnet, therefore, Canea has attracted the scum and offscourings of all the Levant—needy soldiers of fortune, professional revolution-makers, smooth-spoken gamblers and confidence men, rouged and powdered women of easy virtue from east and west, Egyptian donkey-boys, out-at-elbows dragomans who speak a score of tongues and hail from goodness knows where—all that rabble of the needy, the adventurous, and the desperate which follow the armies of occupation and are always to be found on the fringe of civilisation.

The foreign troops are quartered for the most part on the massive Venetian ramparts which still surround the town, but all business centres along the narrow, stone-paved quay bordering the harbour, and in a straggling thoroughfare which, leaving the water-front through a fine old gate still bearing the carven lion of Saint Mark, serves as the vertebra for an amazing tangle of dim alleys and deafening bazaars, in which all the products of the Levant are bought and sold amid indescribable confusion.

Canea is at its best at sunset, for it is not until then that the town awakens to life. As the sun begins to sink behind the Aspra Vouna, the streets, hitherto deserted, become thronged as though by magic; the spaces before the cafés are packed with coffee-drinking, nargileh-smoking humanity of all shades and of all religions; the soldiers begin to appear in groups of twos and threes and fours; the clerks in the shipping-offices put on white drill jackets, and sit in chairs tipped back against their doors, and drink from tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, and the muezzin, brazen-throated, appears on the balcony of his minaret, reminding one for all the world of a Swiss cuckoo-clock as he pops out to chant his interminable call to prayer: “Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar! God is most great! Come to prayer! There is no God but Allah! He giveth life and dieth not! Your sins are great; greater is Allah's mercy! I extol his perfections! Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar!”

It is such a scene as one marks with the white milestone of remembrance that he may go back to it in memory in after years. Picture, if you can, a stone-paved promenade bordering a U-shaped harbour. In the harbour are many craft—all small ones, for it is too shallow for the great steamers to enter. There are caiques with sails of orange, of scarlet, and of yellow; schooners, grain-laden, from Egypt and Turkey and Greece; fishing-boats with rakish lateen-sails and great goggle eyes painted at their bows to ward off the evil eye, and, so the sailors will tell you, to detect the fish. And along the quayside, where the human stream wanders restlessly, there are Greeks in tufted shoes and snowy fustanellas that make them look like ballet-dancers; swarthy Turks in scarlet sashes and scarlet fezes, wearing the unsightly trousers peculiar to their race; bare-kneed Cretan highlanders, descendants in form and feature of the ancient Greeks, swaggering along with insolent grace in their braided, sleeveless jackets and high boots of yellow, untanned leather; Algerians in graceful flowing burnooses and Egyptians with tarbooshes and Arabs with turbans—now and then a mollah with scornful, intolerant eyes and the green turban which marks the wearer as a descendant of the Prophet—and brawny, coal-black negroes from Tripoli, from Nubia, and from the Sudan.

And then there are the soldiers: British Tommies, smart even in khaki, boots shining, buckles shining, faces shining, swaggering along this Cretan street and flourishing their absurd little canes precisely as their fellows are doing all over the globe; French colonials, swathed in blue puttees from ankle to knee and in red cummerbunds from hip to chest, their misery completed by mushroom helmets so large that nothing can be seen of the wearer but his chin; chattering Italian bersaglieri, who strut about in cocks' feathers and crimson facings when at home in the Corso or the Toledo or the Via Vittorio Emmanuele, but out here must needs content their vanity with white linen uniforms and green hackle in their helmets; sad-faced Russians, uniformed as they would be in summer in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, flat white caps, belted white smocks, trousers tucked in boots, their good-humoured, ignorant faces stamped with all the signs of homesickness, for their thoughts are far away in some squalid tenement in the poor quarter of Warsaw perhaps, or in a peasant's cabin beside the head-waters of the Volga.

Though Canea is the seat of government, Candia—or Heraklian, the classic name by which the Greeks prefer to call it—is the largest and most important town on the island. Disregarding the advice of friends, I went from Canea to Candia on a Greek coasting steamer. No one ever takes a first-class passage on a Greek boat, for the second and third class passengers invariably come aft and stay there, despite the commands and entreaties of the purser, so a third-class ticket answers quite as well as a first. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as you choose to regard it—I had as fellow voyagers a company of British infantry, which was being transferred to Candia after three years' service in the western end of the island. The soldiers, who had managed to smuggle aboard a considerable quantity of rum, quickly got beyond the control of the boy lieutenant, just out of Sandhurst, who was in command, and who, appreciating that discretion is the better part of valour, especially where a hundred drunken soldiers are concerned, wisely left them to their own boisterous devices and retreated with me to the captain's quarters on the bridge, where we remained until we sighted Candia's harbour lights and our anchor rumbled down inside the breakwater.

Were it not for the massive Venetian walls which surround it, Candia would have almost the appearance of an Indian town, the similarity being increased by its dark-faced, gaily dressed inhabitants and by the British soldiers who throng its streets. A single broad, stone-paved thoroughfare, lined in places with shade-trees and surprisingly clean, winds like a snake from the harbour up the hill, past rows of blackened ruins—grim reminders of the latest insurrection—past square after square of white-walled, red-tiled houses; through noisy bazaars where the turbaned shopkeepers squat patiently in their doorways; past unkept marble fountains whose stained carvings would make many a museum director envious; past mosques with slender, graceful minarets and groups of filthy beggars grovelling on their steps for alms; past the ornate, twin-domed Greek cathedral, and so on to the ramparts where the British garrison is quartered in yellow barracks that overlook the sea.

But the real Crete is no more to be judged from glimpses of Canea and Candia than America could be judged by visiting New York and Chicago. It is in the picturesque mountain villages of the Sphakiote range that the genuine, untamed, unmixed fighting Cretan is to be found, for these dwellers on the slopes of Mount Ida, alone of all the scattered branches of the great Hellenic family, have preserved in form and feature the splendid physical characteristics of the ancient Greeks. With the Governor of Candia for my guide, the mountain village of Archanais as our destination, and with an escort of gendarmerie clattering at our heels, we set out from Candia one morning before the sun was over the walls, for we had forty miles of hard riding between us and dinner, and roads in the Sphakiote country often consist of nothing more than dried-up water-courses. For the first few miles the road was crowded with peasantry bringing their produce to market—droves of donkeys, wine-skin-laden; long strings of the sturdy, shaggy native ponies tethered head to tail and tail to head, their panniers filled with purple figs or new-dug potatoes; sullen-eyed Turks driving rude native carts, their women-folk veiled to the eyes and hiding even them in the presence of the giaours; chattering Greeks with homespun rugs or bundles of the heavy native lace; now and then a prosperous farmer, striding along with a peculiar rolling walk, due to the round-soled boots affected by the islanders, carrying a measure of potatoes or perhaps a pair of fowls in the baggy seat of his enormous trousers. We passed a grass-grown Turkish cemetery where the gilded tombstones, capped by carven fezes or turbans in the case of men, and shells in that of women, blazed in the morning sunlight, while, a little farther on, we halted for a few moments before the tomb of a revered sheikh, almost hidden by the bits of cloth which the passing faithful had torn from their garments and tied to it.

Some half a dozen miles inland from Candia lie the ruins of Knossos, the one-time palace of King Minos, a powerful monarch of the Mycenæan age who is supposed to have ruled in Crete during that hazy era when mythology ended and history began. The audience chamber and the royal throne, which were old when the Pyramids were built, are still in a perfect state of preservation, though these amazing evidences of prehistoric grandeur are no more interesting than the marvellous network of cellars and subterranean passages which underlie the palace, many of them still lined, just as they were five thousand years ago, with row upon row of mammoth earthen jars for the storage of grain, of olives, and of wine in time of famine or siege. Many eminent archæologists, by the way, maintain that it was from this bewildering maze of corridors and passage-ways that the legend of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, the scene of which was laid in Crete, arose. Were Crete as easy of access as Egypt, these ruins of Knossos would long since have taken rank with those which dot the banks of the Upper Nile.

Half a dozen hours of riding over an open, sun-baked country and later through gloomy pine woods and mountain defiles, with an occasional halt at a wayside xenodocheion that the troopers of our escort might refresh themselves with that nauseous-tasting fermentation of rice known as arrack, which is the national drink of Greece, brought us at last, hot, saddle-worn, and weary, into the village square of Archanais. The demarch of the town, with a dozen or so of the insurrectionist chieftains from the surrounding mountains, awaited our coming beneath a hoary plane-tree that shaded half the village square. Seats were placed for us beneath its grateful shade, and, with the ceremony of which the Greeks are so fond, we were served with small cups of Turkish coffee and with the inevitable loukoum, which is a candy resembling “Turkish delight.” This formal welcome, which no Cretan ever neglects, completed, we were escorted to the house of the demarch, with whom we were to dine. It was a long, low-roofed, homelike dwelling, red tiles above and white plaster beneath, and surrounding it a garden ablaze with flowers. Met at the door by a servant with a pitcher of chased brass, we proceeded to wash in the open air, the domestic pouring the water over our hands in a steady stream, according to the Cretan fashion.

The dinner was beyond description. From a Cretan standpoint it was doubtless a feast for the gods. I, being ravenous with hunger, asked not the names of the strange dishes, but enjoyed everything that was set before me as only a hungry man can. The meal began with ripe olives and spiced meat chopped up with wheat grains and wrapped in mulberry leaves; it passed on through a course that resembled fried egg-plant but wasn't; through duck, stuffed with rice and olives and cooked in oil, and a pudding that tasted as though it had been flavoured with eau de cologne, concluding with small native melons, which I have never seen equalled for flavour except in Turkestan, and, of course, coffee and cigarettes. The meal lasted something over three hours, and then, sitting cross-legged on the divan which ran entirely around the room, the whole party dropped one by one to sleep. The one recollection of Archanais which will always remain with me is that of a roomful of swarthy-faced, black-moustached, baggy-trousered, armed-to-the-teeth, overfed men, notorious revolutionists every one, all sound asleep and all snoring like steam-engines.

That night we rode down the mountains in the moonlight, the snow-capped peaks looming luridly against the purple sky. The moonbeams lighted up the ruined farmsteads which we passed and played fitfully among the gnarled branches of the ancient olive-trees, giving to the silent land an aspect of unutterable peace. The whole world seemed sleeping and the hoofs of our horses rang loudly against the stones. The road which had been white with dust in the morning was a ribbon of silver now; the stately palm-trees stirred ever so gently in the night breeze; the ruins of ancient Knossos grew larger in the moonlight until all its ancient glory seemed restored; the crosses on the Greek cathedral and the crescents on the slender minarets seemed to raise themselves in harmony like fingers pointing toward heaven; the great guns that frowned from the ramparts were hidden in the shadows—all was silence, beauty, infinite peace, until, as we walked our tired horses slowly across the creaking drawbridge into the city, a helmeted figure stepped from the shadow of the walls, a rifle flashed in the moonlight, and a harsh voice challenged:

“Halt! Who goes there?”

• Abbas Hilmi II, 112.
• Abyssinia, 10.
• Africanders, 226.
• Agriculture in: French Africa, 24;
• German Africa, 181;
• Morocco, 32;
• Rhodesia, 214;
• South Africa, 234;
• the Sudan, 128;
• Tripolitania, 85-86.
• Ahaggar (Sahara), 24.
• Alexandria, bombardment of, 111.
• Algeria, 3, 9, 14, 16.
• Algerian hinterland, 57.
• Algiers, 10.
• Americans in: Rhodesia, 217-8;
• the Transvaal, 237.
• Anglo-German secret treaty, 178-9.
• Angola, 177-8.
• Antanarivo, 9.
• Arab: justice, 75;
• resistance to Italian rule, 98;
• weddings, 78;
• women, 77.
• Arabi Pasha, 110.
• Arabi's rebellion, 111.
• Archanais (Crete), 283.
• Artesian wells in the Sahara, 22.
• Ascension Island, 269.
• Ashantee, 254.
• Assuan dam, 123.
• Atlas Mountains, 31.
• Aujila oases, 88.
• Bagirmi, 100.
• Barbary Coast, 8.
• Barka (Tripolitania), 87.
• Barnato, Barney, 243.
• Barotseland, 196.
• Beira (Port. East Africa), 206 et seq.
• Beit, Alfred, 193.
• Belgian Congo, 176-7;
• communications in, 187;
• reversion of, 177.
• Benghazi (Tripolitania), 84, 87.
• Berbers, 36.
• Bey of Tunis, 64.
• Big game in Rhodesia, 196.
• Biskra (Algeria), 60.
• “Blue tongue,” 232.
• Boers, 226.
• Bornu, 100.
• Botha, General Louis, 233 et seq.
• Bridge over the Zambezi, 194.
• British in: Egypt, 111 et seq.;
• South Africa, 223 et seq.
• British South Africa Company, 212.
• Broken Hill (Rhodesia), 194.
• Bulawayo (Rhodesia), 190.
• Bwana M'kubwa (Rhodesia), 194.
• Candia (Crete), 280 et seq.
• Canea (Crete), 272 et seq.
• Cannibalism, 253.
• “Cape-to-Cairo” Railway, 190 et seq.
• Cape Town, 203, 227.
• Capitulations, privileges conferred by Ottoman, 113.
• Caravans, 17, 19, 91.
• Ceuta (Morocco), 47.
• Chartered companies, 212.
• Colomb-Bechar (Morocco), 8.
• Colour problem in South Africa, 226-8.
• Consuls, powers of, in Egypt, 114 et seq.
• Cost of living in Rhodesia, 217.
• Cotton culture in: Egypt, 124;
• the Sudan, 142.
• Country clubs, beneficial effects of, in Rhodesia, 216.
• Crete, 272 et seq.;
• administration of, 275;
• foreign troops in, 279-280;
• hospitality in, 283-4;
• insurrections in, 274.
• Crime in South Africa, 229.
• Crispi, 92.
• Cromer, Lord, 117.
• Cullinan, “The Great,” diamond, 239.
• Cyrenaica, 87.
• Dahomey, 4, 9, 25.
• Dakar (Senegal), 11, 53.
• Dam at Assuan, 202.
• Dancing girls, 58 et seq.
• Dar-es-Salam (German East Africa), 185.
• DeBeers syndicate, formation of, 243.
• Delta of the Nile, 124.
• Derna, capture of, by Americans, 83.
• Desert: reclamation, 21;
• transportation, 23.
• Diamond: fields at Kimberley, 242;
• mining, 234 et seq.
• Dining-cars on “Cape-to-Cairo” Ry., 219.
• Diré-Dawah (Abyssinia), 10.
• Divorce: court in Tunis, 71;
• in Algeria, 70.
• Djibouti (French Somali Coast), 9.
• Drainage project in Egypt, 124.
• Dutch in South Africa, 224.
• Eaton's, Gen. William, capture of Derna, 83.
• Education in French Africa, 6.
• Egypt, 108 et seq.;
• army, 118;
• education, 120;
• future of, 141;
• government, 111 et seq.;
• irrigation, 122;
• justice, 113, 116;
• Khedive, 112, 116, 117, 124;
• land values in, 121.
• Egyptian Debt Commission, 112.
• El Araish (Morocco), 48.
• England's desire for railway zone in German Africa, 198.
• Execution in Tunis, 65.
• Fantasias, 16.
• Fashoda: see Kodok.
• Fevers in East Africa, 152.
• Fez (Morocco), 9.
• Fezzan (Tripolitania), 84, 86.
• Flowers in Morocco, 33.
• Foreign Legion, 15.
• France's African army, 12-14.
• Franco-Spanish treaty, 46.
• French: Africa, 1 et seq.;
• colonial expansion, 1 et seq.;
• Congo (see French Equatorial Africa);
• Equatorial Africa, 4;
• Guinea, 4, 9;
• Sahara, 5;
• Somali Coast, 5;
• sphere of influence, 2 et seq.;
• steamers, 11;
• treatment of natives, 16, 42, 75.
• German Africa, 165 et seq.;
• climate of, 180;
• railways in, 179.
• German colonial expansion, 166;
• desire for the Congo, 176 et seq.;
• desire for Zanzibar, 164;
• East Africa, 175, 185-6;
• trade of, 186;
• interests in Morocco, 172.
• German militarism in Africa, 182, 186;
• overseas banks, 168-170;
• treatment of the natives, 182-4;
• Southwest Africa, 175.
• Germany's foreign policy, 171-2;
• oversea interests, 170.
• Golf in Zanzibar, 149.
• Gordon, General Charles George, 203.
• Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, 140.
• Great Bend of the Niger, 9.
• “Groote Schuur ,” the home of Cecil Rhodes, 223.
• Guano islands, 257.
• Harbours: in French West Africa, 10;
• in German Southwest Africa, 188.
• Harems, life in, 69 et seq.
• Hay's, Sir John Drummond, speech to Sultan of Morocco, 44.
• Heraklian. (See Candia.)
• Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, and Cecil Rhodes, 192.
• Illicit diamond buying, 244.
• Irrigation in: Egypt, 122;
• French North Africa, 21;
• South Africa, 233;
• Sudan, 21, 128.
• Ismail Pasha, 108 et seq.
• Italy in Africa, 80 et seq.
• Ivory Coast, 4, 9.
• Ivory: market in Zanzibar, 153;
• trade, 153 et seq.
• Jamestown (Saint Helena), 262-4.
• Jimini (Ivory Coast), 9.
• Jof (Sahara), 99 et seq.
• Johannesburg, 203, 235 et seq.
• Kabyle marriage customs, 68.
• Kabyles, the, 65 et seq.;
• sale of their daughters by, 66.
• Kabylia (Algeria), 65.
• Kamerun, 173-6.
• Kamerun, New, 173-6.
• Kanem (French Sudan), 5, 9, 100.
• Kangas , 154.
• Karroo, the, 233.
• Katanga District (Belgian Congo), 195-6.
• Keetmanshoop (German Southwest Africa), 188.
• Khalifa, the, 20, 197.
• Khartoum, 138 et seq.
• King Assibi of the Gold Coast, 254.
• King Kabanga of Uganda, 254.
• King Minos of Crete, 282.
• King Prempeh of Ashantee, 254 et seq.
• Kitchener, Lord, of Khartoum, 112, 118.
• Knossos, ruins of, 282.
• Kodok (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 20.
• Kosti (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 198.
• Kourassa (French Guinea), 9.
• Krüger, President Paul, 238.
• Kufra Oases, 88, 99.
• Kumasi (Ashantee), 254.
• Labor, demand for, in Rhodesia, 218.
• Lake No, 137.
• Lake Tanganyika, 187.
• Lake Tchad, 9.
• Language problem in South Africa, 224.
• Laraiche. (See El Araish.)
• Liberia, 3.
• Libya, 80 et seq.
• Livingstone, David, finding of, by Stanley, 151.
• Livingstone's discovery of Victoria Falls, 210.
• Lobenguela, 211.
• Lobito Bay Railway, 179, 201.
• “Longwood,” residence of Napoleon, 266.
• Lualaba River, 187.
• Lüderitz Bay (German Southwest Africa), 188.
• Madagascar, 5, 9, 12.
• Mahé (Seychelles), 248 et seq.
• Majunga (Madagascar), 9.
• Mannesmann Brothers in Morocco, 173.
• Marchand, Major, and the Fashoda incident, 20.
• Marrakesh (Morocco), 30.
• Mashonaland, 209.
• Matabeleland, 190.
• Mauresque women, 67-69.
• Mauritania, 4.
• Méharistes, 18.
• Melilla (Morocco), 47.
• Meroe, Island of (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 138.
• Mineral resources of South Africa, 234.
• Mohammedanism, spread of, in Africa, 95 et seq.
• Moorish character, 38.
• Moors, the, 36.
• Morals of Europeans in East Africa, 157.
• Morocco, 27 et seq.;
• agriculture, 32;
• climate, 33;
• flowers, 33;
• future of, 41, 54;
• natural resources, 34;
• railways projected in, 52;
• slavery in, 51;
• travel in, difficulties of, 35.
• Morocco City. (See Marrakesh.)
• Morocco-Equatoria Convention, 165.
• Mount Ida (Crete), 281.
• Mozambique, 178.
• Mulai-abd-el-Hafid, ex-Sultan of Morocco, 28.
• Mulai Youssef, Sultan of Morocco, 41.
• Napoleon's exile on Saint Helena, 259 et seq.
• Natal, 234.
• Native: labor in South African mines, 243;
• troops in French Africa, 13.
• Natives: treatment of Rhodesian, 218;
• treatment of South African, 229.
• New Kamerun, 5, 173-6.
• Nikki (Dahomey), 9.
• Nile, the, 122;
• as agent of prosperity, 21;
• plan to divert the, 20.
• Oases, Saharan, 24.
• Oasis of: Kaouer, 24;
• Kufra, 88, 99;
• Jof, 99 et seq.;
• Tuat, 52.
• Omdurman (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 126.
• Orange River Free State, 224.
• Otavi District (German Southwest Africa), 188.
• Ouled-Naïls, 56 et seq.
• Papal assistance to Italy in taking of Tripolitania, 92.
• Parliament of Union of South Africa, 227.
• Port Florence (British East Africa), 200.
• Portugal in Africa, 177.
• Portuguese East Africa, 178.
• Premier Diamond Mine, 239.
• Pretoria (Transvaal), 238.
• Race problem in South Africa, 225.
• Railway: “Afro,” 52, 179;
• “Cape-to-Cairo,” 190 et seq.;
• Lobito Bay, 179, 201;
• Otavi, 188;
• Uganda, 200.
• Railways in: Abyssinia, 10;
• Algeria, 8;
• Central Africa, 190;
• French Africa, 8;
• German Africa, 179;
• Morocco, 52;
• Rhodesia, 219;
• the Sahara, 8;
• the Sudan, 131-3;
• West Africa, 9.
• Rand, the, 235.
• Rejaf (Uganda), 137.
• Réunion, 12.
• Rhodes, Cecil John, 190 et seq., 211, 212.
• Rhodes Memorial near Cape Town, 203.
• Rhodesia, 205 et seq.;
• agriculture, 214;
• climate, 209, 213-4;
• cost of living in, 217;
• country clubs in, 216;
• future of, 222;
• government, 212;
• labour, demand for skilled, 217;
• law and order in, 214;
• natives, 218;
• railways, 219;
• resources, 214.
• Riff, the (Morocco), 46-48.
• Rinderpest, 232.
• Rogers, American adventurer, 151.
• Sahara, 18, 21.
• Saint Helena, 258 et seq.
• Saint Pierre Island, 257.
• Salisbury, Lord, 192.
• Salisbury (Rhodesia), 213.
• Sand storms, 132.
• Sea turtles, 272.
• Sebu River (Morocco), 32.
• Senegal, 4.
• Senegambia, 25.
• Senussi, the sheikh, 99 et seq.
• Senussiyeh, Brotherhood of, 98 et seq.
• Seychelles, 248 et seq.;
• climate of, 251;
• housekeeping in, 252-3.
• Sharef River (Morocco), 32.
• Sherifian dynasty, 42.
• Slavery in North Africa, 73.
• Sleeping-sickness, 213.
• Sobat River, 20.
• Sokoto (Nigeria), 100.
• South Africa, Union of, 223 et seq.;
• agriculture, 234;
• colour problem in, 226-8;
• diamond-mining, 234 et seq.;
• future of, 246;
• language problem in, 224;
• mineral resources of, 234;
• need of irrigation in, 233;
• race problem in, 225;
• treatment of natives in, 228-231.
• Spanish sphere of influence in Morocco, 46.
• Sphakiote Mountains (Crete), 281.
• Stanley, Henry M., 151, 211.
• Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian, 126 et seq. ;
• agriculture, 128;
• future of, 141;
• government, 127;
• railways, 131-3.
• Sudd, the, 137.
• Suez Canal, 141.
• Sultan of Morocco, 41.
• Sultan of Turkey, 96.
• Sultan of Zanzibar, 160 et seq.
• Sus, the (Morocco), 46, 49.
• Swahili: language, 156;
• race, 154.
• Swakopmund (German Southwest Africa), 188, 200.
• Table Mountain (Cape of Good Hope), 203.
• Tamatave (Madagascar), 9.
• Tangier (Morocco), 10, 43, 54.
• Teneriffe (Canary Islands), 271.
• Tewfik Pasha, 110.
• Tibesti (Sahara), 24.
• Timbuktu (Upper Senegal-Niger Territories), 8, 9, 53.
• Tippoo Tib, 151.
• Tobruk (Tripolitania), 87.
• Togoland, 175.
• Tortoise shell from Saint Pierre, 257.
• Transvaal, 235.
• Treatment of women in North Africa, 74-79.
• Tripoli (Tripolitania), 84-89.
• Tripolitania, 80 et seq.;
• future of, 88, 105;
• trade of, 91.
• Tsetse-fly, 208, 213.
• Tuaregs, 99.
• Tuat (Sahara), 52.
• Tunisia, 3.
• Tunisian justice, 64.
• Tunisian perfumery, 67.
• Turkish Sultan's influence in Africa, 96.
• Uganda Railway, 200.
• Ujda (Morocco), 9.
• Ujiji (German East Africa), 187.
• Umtali (Mashonaland), 209.
• United States in Africa, 82 et seq.
• Upper Senegal-Niger Territories, 4.
• Vasco da Gama, 143.
• Victoria (Seychelles), 254.
• Victoria Falls, 194, 210, 220 et seq.
• Victoria Nyanza, 198, 203.
• Wadai, 5, 9, 100.
• Wady Haifa (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 137.
• Walfish Bay (German Southwest Africa), 188.
• Women of North Africa, 56 et seq.
• “World's View” (Cape of Good Hope), 203.
• Zambezi River, 221.
• Zanzibar, 143 et seq.;
• climate, 146;
• future of, 163;
• German desire for, 164;
• hotel accommodation in, 146-7;
• ivory market in, 153;
• natives of, 154;
• Sultan of, 160 et seq.;
• tropical diseases in, 152.
• Ziban, the (Algerian Sahara), 57.
• Zulus, 229.

MAP OF AFRICA, SHOWING RAILWAYS AND SPHERES OF INFLUENCE.
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