NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA 81 



registered over 112° in the shade. Many lonely 

 nights had I passed, and many weary miles had 

 I trudged in silence, my mind one dismal blank. 

 Unless one has been severed from his own race 

 for many days, has watched the sun sink over 

 the tropical forest belts and plains of Central 

 Africa for night after night, with never a companion 

 of his own colour to sit by the camp-fire and smoke 

 the evening pipe, it is impossible to realize the 

 feeling of excitement and almost delirious joy 

 experienced when one day a white man, arrayed 

 in the same ragged garments as yourself, meets 

 you in some remote corner of the great continent, 

 and shakes your hand with that grip of true 

 sincerity which is more often felt in little-trodden 

 paths than on the highways of civilization. 

 Under such circumstances strong and ordinarily 

 unemotional men have been known to embrace 

 one another. Z. was a quaint figure with his 

 curiously-trimmed little beard, hair long and 

 dishevelled and face the colour of parchment. 

 But he was an even more strange man to talk to. 

 He rattled away on every conceivable subject, 

 from the length of rhino horns to the tonnage 

 of Dreadnoughts, and from Napoleon to Baobab 

 trees. He carried with him, moreover, a library 

 which I had little expected to find in an Awisa 

 village in the Luangwa Valley. Emerson and 

 Shakespeare and Browning were packed away 

 with cartridges and tins of jam, and after much 

 trouble he unearthed for me Milton from the 

 bottom of a bag of salt. At times his conversa- 

 tion wandered in a most bewildering manner. 

 He would suddenly break off in the middle of a 

 most interesting discourse on the merits of some 

 particular rifle, and tell me how he had been 

 arrested by Belgian officials in the Congo. Yes, 



