160 SPORT AND TRAVEL 



land. Of course they could have done nothing with- 

 out the water, but in many cases the water has been 

 led out from the river for miles to their homesteads, 

 at the cost of an enormous amount of labour. Many 

 of these hard-working people, I was told, were Mor- 

 mons from Utah, who are said to understand cultivat- 

 ing land by means of irrigation better than any other 

 people in the United States. If Mr. Rhodes could 

 only manage to transplant a few hundred of these 

 hard-working Mormon families to the high plateaus 

 of Matabeleland and Mashonaland, what a transforma- 

 tion they would work in those countries in a few 

 short years ! provided always they did not succumb 

 to the influences of their new environment, and 

 gradually come to consider manual labour derogatory 

 to a white man in a country where there exist 

 numerous aboriginal dark-skinned races, who can be 

 hired to work and sweat in the hot sun whilst the 

 European contents himself with the part of overseer. 

 There are, of course, some countries where white 

 men cannot work all day in the sun ; but on the 

 plateaus of the interior of South Africa they most 

 certainly can, and would, were it not for the pres- 

 ence of the less civilised black races. 



On the afternoon of September 6 we got into a 

 country where a few prong-horned antelopes still 

 roamed; but although we left the road and made a 

 long detour in search of them, we did not come across 

 any of the animals themselves, though we saw a few 



