brought us to Eort Charter and our waggons in time
for our midday meal. Thoroughly did we enjoy
our tables, our chairs, and our waggon-beds after
nearly three weeks’ intimate acquaintance with mother
earth. Until the experience of greater privations
farther north came upon us, we thought we enjoyed
the food, the soup, the bully beef, the bread, and the
jam which our cook placed before our hungry eyes
to the utmost extent that man could do.
Here we regretfully parted with our friend
Mashah and most of our Makalangas ; two only of enterprising
mind elected to follow us and earn more
blankets, and they served us with unswerving fidelity
till we reached the coast at Beira. Mashanani was
the name of one of them, whose only fault was a too
great attachment to Kaffir beer ; Iguzu was the name
of the other, the most industrious man I ever saw.
When not working for us, he would sit on a rock for
ever patching a ragged old shirt that had been presented
to him, until there was little of the original
fabric left, or else turning old jam tins into ornaments
or threading beads.
CHAPTER IX
FORT SA L ISBU R Y AND THE OLD WORKINGS
AND RUINS OF THE MAZOE V A L L E Y
A p e w remarks on the future capital of the Mashona-
land gold-fields may not be amiss, by way of sharp
contrast, in a work more especially devoted to the
study of the past. The same motive, namely, the
thirst for gold, created the hoary walls of Zimbabwe
and the daub huts of Fort Salisbury, probably the
oldest and the youngest buildings erected for the
purpose by mankind, ever keen after that precious
metal which has had so remarkable an influence
on generation after generation of human atoms.
These remarks on Fort Salisbury will, moreover,
have a certain amount of historical value in years
to come, when it has its railway, its town hall,
and its cathedral, for we were there on the day on
which its first birthday was kept, the anniversary
of the planting of the British flag by the pioneers
on the dreary upland waste of Mashonaland. It
seemed to us a very creditable development, too,
for so young a place, when it is taken into consideration
that Fort Salisbury, unlike the mushroom
towns of the Western Hemisphere, has grown up at a
R