110 MEETING WITH MR. MACABE. 



work on the public roads. And he has since, I am in- 

 formed, made himself the missionary to his own people. 

 He is tall, rather corpulent, and has more of the negro 

 feature than common, hut has large eyes. He is Yery 

 dirk ; and his people swear by " Black Oechele." He 

 h ls great intelligence, reads well, and is a mient speaker. 

 Great numbers of the tribes, formerly living under the 

 Boers, have taken refuge under his sway, and he is now 

 greater in power than he was before the attack on Kolo- 

 beng. 



Having parted with Sechele, we skirted along the 

 Kalahari Desert, and sometimes within its borders, giving 

 the Boers a wide berth. A larger fall of rain than usual 

 had occurred in 1852, and that was the completion of 

 a cycle of eleven or twelve years, at which the same 

 phenomenon is reported to have happened on three 

 occasions. An unusually large crop of melons had ap- 

 peared in consequence. We had the pleasure of meeting 

 with Mr. J. Macabe returning from Lake Ngami, which 

 he had succeeded in reaching by going right across the 

 Desert from a point a little to the south of Kolobeng. 

 The accounts of the abundance of water-melons were 

 amply confirmed by this energetic traveller, for having 

 these in vast quantities his cattle subsisted on the fluid 

 contained in them for a period of no less than twenty- 

 one days ; and when at last they reached a supply of 

 water they did not seem to care much about it. Coming 

 to the lake from the south-east, he crossed the Teoughe, 

 and went round the northern part of it, and is the only 

 European traveller who had actually seen it all. His 

 estimate of the extent of the lake is higher than that 

 given by Mr. Oswell and myself, or from about ninety 

 to one hundred miles in circumference. Before the lake 

 was discovered Macabe wrote a letter in one of the Cape 

 papers recommending a certain route as likely to lead 

 to it. The Transvaal Boers fined him 500 dollars for 

 writing about " onze felt," our country, and imprisoned 

 him too till the fine was paid. I now learned from his 

 own lips that the public report of this is true. Mr. Mac- 

 abe's companion, Mahar, was mistaken by a tribe of 

 Barolongs for a Boer, and shot as he approached their 

 village. When Macabe came up and explained that he 

 was an Englishman, they expressed the utmost regret, 

 and helped to bury him. This was the first case in recent 



