DECORATED HUT DOOR
Every day, as we approached the Sabi Valley, the scenery became grander; the dreary high plateau gave place to deep valleys and high rugged mountains; the vegetation was much more luxuriant and the atmosphere many degrees hotter, so hot that during our midday halts we did not care to wander very far from our camp, especially as we had a good deal of manual labour to perform apart from the actual travelling, in tent pitching, bed making, and cooking, for our white men were generally so tired with driving and packing the donkeys that we could not ask them to do anything after the march was over.
We soon got accustomed to sleeping on the ground. When it was unusually rugged, for the [[260]]grass grows here in tufts like the hair on the niggers’ heads, we got grass cut on which to lay our rugs; occasionally we found it necessary to encamp on spots over which a grass fire had passed, and then we got hopelessly black, and lived like sweeps until we reached a stream, where we could wash ourselves and our clothes.
STRAW HAT
[[261]]
Lutilo, with the village of Luti perched upon one of its lower precipices, is quite a grand mountain, almost Alpine in character, with exquisite views over the distant Sabi and Manica Mountains. Here we tarried for almost a whole day to visit an insignificant set of ruins a few miles distant, called Metemo, but which formed a link in the great chain of forts stretching northwards. It had been built in three circles of very rough stone, somewhat ingeniously put together on the top of a rounded granite hill, but hopelessly ruined. So we only tarried there a while to make a plan, and to rest, and enjoy the lovely view.
The country around here is very thickly wooded, and on our return to our camp a herd of deer passed close to us, a species known to the Dutch as Swartvit-pens, or ‘swarthy white paunches,’ but we failed to get one, a matter of considerable regret from a commissariat point of view, for meat is scarce in the villages about here, and our tinned supplies were getting low.
We struck our camp at Lutilo rather late in the afternoon, and only got as far as a river called the ’Nyatzetse, the crossing of which involved the unloading of our animals. On the way we passed through two villages, where the inhabitants were busily engaged in building huts, for it was evidently a new encampment, and in making beer, which was too new to drink; the land around was being freshly turned up for their fields, after the approved Makalanga [[262]]fashion. First they clear a space of jungle, leaving the larger trees, and pile up the brushwood round the roots, then they set fire to the heaps, and when it is consumed the tree is killed, and more easy to cut down.