comfortable as rain would permit, for it fell in torrents
here even though it was the dry season. The
term e Matindela ’ means 1 guinea-fowl,’ quantities
of which birds are found around here, as indeed they
are in most parts of this country.
We were now only twenty miles from the Sabi
Eiver, and the country around was almost deserted,
ruined villages crowned most of if the heiOg hts," and the
deserted fields and devastation in every direction were
lamentable to behold. There were evidences, too, of
a fairly recent raid, in which the poor Makalangas
had been driven out of their homes and probably
carried into slavery. By common consent the two
great Zulu chiefs, Lobengula and Gungunyana, whose
embassy visited England last year, consider the Sabi
as their respective boundary for marauding expeditions.
On this occasion I believe Gungunyana and
his Shangans were to blame, who, finding that Lobengula
was cut off by the Chartered Company from this
part of his district, had made bold to cross the Sabi
and raid on the western side, bringing destruction
into the Makalanga homes, which in former years
had here been thought very secure, being, as they
were, far from Lobengula and just out of Gungunyana’s
recognised district.
The Makalangas have the greatest horror of the
Shangans, who dwell across the Sabi, and do Gungunyana’s
bidding. One day at Matindela we brought
home a specimen of a curious fruit which hangs from
the trees, eighteen inches to two feet long, like thick
German sausages ; it has beans inside, and we asked
Mashah if it was good to e a t: ‘ No Makalangas eat
zimvebe,’ as he called it, ‘ only the Shangans and
baboons.’
Whilst at Matindela we sampled several kinds of
strange fruit: firstly the Kaffir orange, a kind of
strychnia, which is a hard fruit with yellow pulp
inside around seeds, and of which every traveller
shouldbeware of eating if not quite ripe—an error into
which several of our party fell; it is apt to produce
violent sickness under those conditions, and at best it
is painfully astringent, causing horrible facial contortions
when you eat it, as most of the fruits about here
-do. Amongst other things, they brought to our
•camp at Matindela large quantities of the delicious
cucumbers, monkey-nuts, sweet potatoes, and a sweet
fruit which you chew and spit out like sugar-cane,
which they call matoJco. From the gigantic trees
nround us, the far-famed baobab trees, we gathered
the nuts with the refreshing cream of tartar pulp
inside. The baobab is the great feature of Matindela
TTill ; there are a dozen of them on it, huge giants,
which in their growth have knocked down large
portions of the walls. Though probably these trees
are not as old as report says, nevertheless their
presence here proves that these ruins have been
utterly abandoned for many centuries. It is another
problem to prove how their thick roots find sustenance
for so huge a vegetable growth, perched as
they are on an almost soil-less granite rock. Doubtless
these roots follow the fissures in the granite and
■obtain the required moisture from some considerable
a 2