No, it must be "Mr. Rhodes" or "the Old Man."
I, personally, never got beyond "Mr. Rhodes" in his lifetime, and I don't see why I should now that he is dead.
As I was about to remark, the best piece of imaginative work that Mr. Rhodes ever did was to plan the Cape to Cairo Railway. It has not been carried out yet, but that doesn't matter; one day we shall see it, unless flying kills the train.
The corner-stone to this imaginative piece of work is, without a doubt, the bridge over the Victoria Falls.
I watched that bridge being built, not girder by girder, of course, but generally speaking. Old Mkuni watched it girder by girder.
Mkuni was a fine old savage, who had, in his far off younger days, carved out a little kingdom for himself. He possessed the left bank of a little river called the Maramba, some square miles of rock, a few acres of good land, and—the Victoria Falls.
A man who could establish his claim to the Falls has a right to be regarded as of some importance.
Within the memory of man a large herd of elephants went over the Falls and whirled in the Boiling Pot below—a noble offering to the spirits who dwell there. Anyone who denies that the Falls are the abode of spirits is a fool, be he white man or black.
Old Mkuni looked after the Falls and ministered in divers ways to the wants of the spirits who inhabited the place. He it was who, in fair and fierce battle, took this precious spot from old Sekute, the wall-eyed ruffian who used to live on the north bank of the Zambesi.
To hide his defeat from the eyes of passing natives, old Sekute set up a noble avenue of poles from the river to his village. On every pole he placed a human skull; these, he vowed, were the headpieces of Mkuni's men. Mkuni could afford to laugh, for did not he and all the world know that some of the grim trophies were the heads of Sekute's own followers, slain by Mkuni's men and added to at the expense of half a hundred of Sekute's own slaves? All this was before Livingstone discovered the Falls.