into everything:  the nature of the country, with its mountains and rivers, forests and deserts, for scores of miles around; its animal and human diseases; its capacity for supplies and transport; its climate and soil and rainfall.  And one of your first discoveries is that the books of the travelers are mostly wrong.  What to them was perhaps a paradise of plant or animal life is to you, moving with your vast impedimenta, a veritable purgatory.  You soon come to agree with Scripture that all men are liars, and from this rule you do not even except the missionaries who write with their heads in the clouds; nor do you except the writers of intelligence books compiled in Whitehall from the hunting tales of the travelers or the fairy-tales of the missionaries, and marked “very secret.”  But these secrets are like most secrets of the African continent, very disconcerting to the simple, trustful soul.

[Sidenote:  The silence of the forest is broken by the tramp of armed men.]

[Sidenote:  Horses virtually unknown.]

These campaigning experiences were unique.  Probably never before in the history of the world had such things been seen:  the stillness, the brooding silence of the vast primeval forest where no, or few, white men have ever been before, and the only path is the track of the elephant; the silence of the forest, stretching for hundreds of miles in all directions, broken by the tramp of tens of thousands of armed men, followed by the guns and heavy transport of a modern army, with its hundreds of motor-lorries, its miles of wagons, its vast concourse of black porters; while overhead the aeroplane, or, as the natives call it, the “bird,” more dreaded and more feared than even the crocodile in the river, passes on swiftly with its bombs for the foe retreating ahead.  And what an effect this movement, continued for many months over many thousands of miles, produced on the minds of the native population, looking on in speechless awe and amazement at the mystery of the white man’s doings!  I have often stopped to wonder at the natives’ state of mind.  It must have been not unlike what is told of one of my simple countrymen, on whose farm an aviator descended with an aeroplane, never seen or heard of before, and who calmly walked forward to shake hands with the heavenly visitant, whom he believed none other than the Lord!  And since horses, because of the fly, are virtually unknown in most parts of the country, the natives were dumfounded by our mounted men, strange centaur-like animals that they called “Kabure,” after my mounted Boer forces, of whom at first they were mortally afraid.  Even bodies of well-trained armed native soldiers have been seen to throw away their rifles and run for dear life into the bush at the first sight of mounted men.

[Sidenote:  Parallel mountain ranges rise in tiers.]

[Sidenote:  The second belt or veldt.]

[Sidenote:  Changes in rainfall.]