his head he will make due south and must inevitably .. 

 strike the road. After going for half an hour and| 

 seeing nothing familiar, he begins to feel that he is 

 going in the wrong direction ; something pulls at 

 him to face right about. Only a few minutes more of 

 this, and he feels sure that he must have crossed the 

 road without noticing it, and therefore that he ought 

 to be going north instead of south, if he hopes ever to 

 strike it again. How, you will ask, can a man imagine 

 it possible to cross a big dusty road twenty or thirty \ 

 feet wide without seeing it ? The idea seems absurd ; 

 yet they do really believe it. One of the first illusions 

 that occurs to men when they lose their heads is that 

 they have done this, and it is the cause of scores of 

 cases of ' lost in the bush.' The idea that they may 

 have done it is absurd enough ; but stranger still is 

 the fact that they actually do it. 



If you cannot understand a man thinking he had 

 done such a thing, what can you say of a man actually 

 doing it ? Impossible, quite impossible, you think. 

 Ah ! but it is a fact : many know it for a fact and I 

 have witnessed it twice myself, once in Mashonaland 

 and once on the Delagoa road. I saw men, tired, 

 haggard and wild-eyed, staring far in front of them, 

 never looking at the ground, pressing on, on, on, and 

 actually cross well-worn waggon roads, coming from 

 hard veld into a sandy wheel-worn track and kicking 

 up a cloud of dust as they passed, and utterly blind to 

 the fact that they were walking across the roads they 

 had been searching for in one case for ten hours? 

 and in the other for three days. When we called toft 

 123 



^^4 



