42 UNDER THE AFRICAN SUN 



fact, that far beyond the present limits of the white man in these 

 regions, there hes a land, where gold is plentiful, and where the 

 natives are ignorant of its value or its use, except that the 

 humblest can and does use it as the cheapest ornament where- 

 with to deck himself. Hardy Arab traders, it is said, have 

 now and again managed to penetrate to these auriferous realms 

 which are difficult to reach owing to enormous foodless tracts 

 which the traveller has first to cross. The knowledge of the 

 road to this land of gold, and everything that might betray its 

 whereabouts, is kept, so they say, a secret by the Arabs. On 

 my last journey I met an Arab caravan proceeding up country, 

 ostensibly to trade for ivory and to shoot elephants if necessary. 

 My Arab servant was an old friend of the Arab in command of 

 the caravan ; this led to my having a long chat with them about 

 those gold countries. The Arab told me that if his provisions 

 held out, he had made up his mind to attempt the journey. 

 He was going to buy up provisions in the market at Fort 

 Smith. He professed to know a good deal about the subject, 

 and according to him this gold country lies far beyond Lake 

 Rudolph, a lake which other travellers have visited since Teleki's 

 discovery. The Arab had apparently as firm a faith in the 

 existence of such a gold countrv as Columbus had in the New 

 World he discovered. 



I can quite understand the food difficulty to be an almost 

 impassable barrier. There was a food difficulty on my first 

 journey to Uganda, owing to the caravan route passing for 

 some twenty days through an uninhabited country ; but the 

 difficulty is minimised by knowing exactlv the number of days 

 it takes a caravan to traverse the distance. A better insight 

 into the risks of travelling through a foodless region, without 

 knowing exactly how long the journey may last, I experienced 

 when I travelled through the Magwangwara country in German 

 East Africa to the coast. The Magwangwara kings had delibe- 

 rately surrounded their country with an enormous starvation 

 area, by ruthlessly destroying villages and whole races around 

 them. The foodless belt was a greater protection to them than 

 the Great Wall of China has been to the Chinese emperors. 

 This wilderness my nephew and I determined to penetrate. 

 We provided ourselves as best we could for the journey. 

 Before we reached the end of our expedition, we were driven 

 to subsist on starvation allowance, a handful of rice in the 



