Palapshwye, the largest native town south of the Zambesi, is an immense mass of huts, planted without the smallest attempt at order over the sandy hill slope, some two square miles in extent. The huts are small, with low walls of clay and roofs of grass, so that from a distance the place looks like a wilderness of beehives. Each of the chief men has his own hut and those of his wives inclosed in a rough fence of thorns, or perhaps of prickly-pear, and between the groups of huts lie open spaces of sand or dusty tracks. In the middle of the town close to the huts of Khama himself, who, however, being a Christian, has but one wife, stands the great kraal or kothla. It is an inclosure some three hundred yards in circumference, surrounded by a stockade ten feet high, made of dry trunks and boughs of trees stuck in the ground so close together that one could not even shoot a gun, or hurl an assagai through them. The stockade might resist the first attack of native enemies if the rest of the town had been captured, but it would soon yield to fire. In the middle of it stands the now dry trunk of an old tree, spared when the other trees were cut down to make the kraal, because it was supposed to have magical powers, and heal those who touched it. A heap of giraffe skins lay piled against it, but its healing capacity now finds less credit, at least among those who wish to stand well with the chief. Within this inclosure Khama holds his general assemblies when he has some address to deliver to the people or some ordinance to proclaim. He administers criminal justice among his subjects, and decides their civil disputes, usually with the aid of one or two elderly counsellors. He has tried to improve their agricultural methods, and being fond of horses has formed a good stud. Unhappily, in 1896, the great murrain descended upon the Bamangwato, and Khama and his tribe lost nearly all the cattle (said to have numbered eight hundred thousand) in which their wealth consisted.
The British magistrate—there are about seventy Europeans living in the town—described these Bechuanas as a quiet folk, not hard to manage. They have less force of character and much less taste for fighting than Zulus or Matabili. The main impression which they leave on a stranger is that of laziness. Of the many whom we saw hanging about in the sun, hardly one seemed to be doing any kind of work. Nor do they. They grow a few mealies (maize), but it is chiefly the women who hoe and plant the ground. They know how to handle wire and twist it round the handles of the sjamboks (whips of hippopotamus hide). But having few wants and no ambition, they have practically no industries, and spend their lives in sleeping, loafing, and talking. When one watches such a race, it seems all the more strange that a man of such remarkable force of character as Khama should suddenly appear among them.[45]
For about sixty miles north-eastward from Palapshwye the country continues dull, dry, and mostly level. After that rocky hills appear, and in the beds of the larger streams a little water is seen. At Tati, ninety miles from Palapshwye (nearly four hundred from Mafeking), gold reefs have been worked at intervals for five and twenty years, under a concession originally granted (1869), by Lo Bengula, and a little European settlement has grown up. Here one passes from Bechuanaland into the territories which belonged to the Matabili, and now to the British South Africa Company. The country rises and grows more picturesque. The grass is greener on the pastures. New trees appear, some of them bearing beautiful flowers, and the air is full of tales of lions. For, in Africa, where there is more grass there is more game, and where there is more game there are more beasts of prey. Lions, we were told, had last week dragged a Kafir from beneath a waggon where he was sleeping. Lions had been seen yester eve trotting before the coach. Lions would probably be seen again to-morrow. But to us the beast was always a lion of yesterday or a lion of to-morrow, never a lion of to-day. The most direct evidence we had of his presence was when, some days later, we were shown a horse on which that morning a lion had sprung, inflicting terrible wounds. The rider was not touched, and galloped the poor animal back to camp. At Mangwe, a pretty little station with exceptionally bad sleeping quarters, the romantic part of the country may be said to begin. All round there are rocky kopjes, and the track which leads northward follows a line of hollows between them, called the Mangwe Pass, a point which was of much strategical importance in the Matabili war of 1893, and became again of so much importance in the recent native rising (1896) that one of the first acts of the British authorities was to construct a rough fort in it and place a garrison there. Oddly enough, the insurgents did not try to occupy it, and thereby cut off the English in Matabililand from their railway base at Mafeking, the reason being, as I was informed, that the Molimo, or prophet, whose incitements contributed to the insurrection, had told them that it was by the road through this pass that the white strangers would quit the country for ever.
A more peaceful spot could not be imagined than the pass was when we passed through it at 5 A.M., "under the opening eyelids of the dawn." Smooth green lawns, each surrounded by a fringe of wood, and filled with the songs of awakening birds, lay beneath the beetling crags of granite,—granite whose natural grey was hidden by brilliant red and yellow lichens,—and here and there a clear streamlet trickled across the path. Climbing to the top of one of these rocky masses, I enjoyed a superb view to north, west, and east, over a wilderness of rugged hills, with huge masses of grey rock rising out of a feathery forest, while to the north the undulating line, faintly blue in the far distance, marked the point where the plateau of central Matabililand begins to decline toward the valley of the Zambesi. It was a beautiful prospect both in the wild variety of the foreground and in the delicate hues of ridge after ridge melting away towards the horizon, and it was all waste and silent, as it has been since the world began.
The track winds through the hills for some six or eight miles before it emerges on the more open country. These kopjes, which form a sort of range running east-south-east and west-north-west, are the Matoppo Hills, in which the main body of the Matabili and other insurgent natives held their ground during the months of April, May and June, 1896. Although the wood is not dense, by no means so hard to penetrate as the bush or low scrub which baffled the British troops in the early Kafir wars, waged on the eastern border of Cape Colony, still the ground is so very rough, and the tumbled masses of rock which lie round the foot of the granite kopjes afford so many spots for hiding, that the agile native, who knows the ground, had a far better chance against the firearms of the white men than he could have had in the open country where the battles of 1893 took place. Seeing such a country one can well understand that it was quite as much by famine as by fighting that the rising of 1896 was brought to an end.
From the northern end of the Mangwe Pass it is over forty miles to Bulawayo, the goal of our journey, and the starting-point for our return journey to the coast of the Indian Ocean. But Bulawayo is too important a place to be dealt with at the end of a chapter already sufficiently long.