i88i.] 
On the Way to the Zambesi. 
7 
WAGGON JOURNEYS. 
November isf. — I have been very busy preparing to move on, 
as I heard of waggons starting for Potchefstroom next week, 
and should have left before this, but the gospel meetings detained 
me. The summer season has now set in, and almost as sure as 
the clock a thunderstorm with heavy rains comes on every 
evening about six, so that it is quite impossible for people to 
come out even if they are willing. 
The friends here are all very hearty as to my going into the 
interior, and greatly help by finding out the most suitable things 
to take. 
Inland journeys from Maritzburg are made by means of ox- 
waggons, each carrying between three and four tons weight of 
goods, and drawn by from sixteen to twenty oxen. Four or five 
waggons, however, generally travel together, as the roads in many 
places are very hilly, and in others so marshy that more than one 
team of oxen is required to get the waggons along. 
It does look stupid to see so many oxen drawing one waggon 
over the level roads about town ; but when one sees them out in 
the country dragging it through a quagmire, with great boulders 
of stone hidden in the mud every few yards, and then up a 
tremendously steep hill, one wonders how they manage to get 
along at all. Sometimes as many as seventy oxen have to be 
yoked to one transport-waggon. 
The country about Natal is very hilly. Last week I walked to 
Greytown, fifty miles, and came back in a postcart. I enjoyed 
the trip very much. Greytown is a nice little place, about twenty 
miles from the Zulu border. The distance by postcart takes little 
over seven hours, including stoppages. They change horses 
every ten miles — half the way there are four horses, and six 
the other half. 
If you can imagine being dragged across the country from 
Glasgow to Edinburgh in an afternoon — plunging into rivers, 
and the water splashing over the horses' backs ; shaving deep 
water-cuttings, rushing over an avalanche of stones, and rounding 
sharp corners of the road, with a deep gorge echoing below, 
all at the same mad pace — you may imagine how I felt when 
I reached Maritzburg. 
Do not be anxious about me; you know well in whose hands I am. 
