At Fontes Villa, a little town built on piles, at present the railway headquarters, we déjeûnered with the manager of the line in a beautifully green verandah. Such fruit! mangoes, bananas, grenadillas, limes, and pineapples. Thermometer 115° in the shade.
Smart, gentlemanly young fellows acting in all the lower as well as upper railway capacities, but with lots of life and lots of death, for Fontes Villa possesses two cemeteries—one, the “old” one (three years old), being full, the new one had been made nearer to the station, to be more “handy,” and this one also looks like being full very soon.
About twenty miles farther on, somebody spied the masts of a ship above the bush, and soon we ran into the station at Beira.
Beira is a long town of about 1500 inhabitants, the houses built along a spit of sand for two miles between the sea and a mangrove creek. With good wharf, storehouses, a tile–roofed hospital, and a curiosity in a great square red and white lighthouse, substantial–looking, but on close inspection showing itself to be of corrugated iron, painted.
We did not wait to look at these, but got ourselves and baggage transferred without delay to the s. s. Pongola, lying off the shore in the mouth of the Pungwe River. The Pungwe here opens from its flat mangrove banks into an estuary some ten miles across.
After dinner (which happily was laid on deck, after the manner of the Florio–Rubbatino ships in the Mediterranean), the General, Rhodes, Sir Charles Metcalfe, and I went ashore to call on Colonel Machado, the Portuguese commandant. We found him a handsome, clever–looking man of forty–five, speaking English well, and full of knowledge of the country, and very friendly; but his house was mighty hot, and we were glad to get back into our homeward car in the open air.
The roads in Beira are of deep soft sand by nature, but their imperfections had been got over by art. A little tram line runs along the main street, with offshoots to all the by–roads. Public and private tram–cars, holding four persons each, run along the rail, propelled by shoving niggers.
19th December.—After a general farewell visit of friends from the shore, we got under way at 10 a. m.
How good it is to feel the first few heaves of the screw as the ship is being turned in the yellow tide to set her head for home!
We steamed out through the seventeen miles of sandbanks that form the mouth of the Pungwe and Busi Rivers. We stuck for half an hour on one shoal, but floated off with the rising tide, and soon dropped the low flat shore of Beira out of sight.