VISIT TO SOUTH AFRICA. 
283 
Earl’s Court ; an old American hickory-wood coach, with clumsy 
leather springs. Well it is in one of those things that one travels to 
Buluwayo ; twelve seats inside and goodness knows how many on the 
top, the mails being also piled up on the roof. The seat one sits on is 
about the breadth of the small book I hold in my hand. There is no 
back to it but just a small leather strap ; one sits with knees rammed 
up against the knees of the man opposite, packed like herrings on each 
side, unless one gets the corner seat; then one gets banged the whole 
time against the side of the coach and suffocated with dust, and such 
dust ! 
Gilbert must have meant South Africa when he wrote—- 
The earth of a dusty to-day 
Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow. 
The coach itself is dragged by relays of ten mules at a time. Poor 
mules! They had been tremendously hard worked owing to the 
Matabele war, which put everything at high pressure ; they were mere 
bags of bones, and to get them along at all was a matter of continual 
flogging. A man sits on the box with a long whip in his hand, known 
as the driver. The man who holds the reins is termed a louper, but 
generally one of them runs along side distributing blows indiscrimi¬ 
nately with a sjambok to keep the mules moving. We moved at the 
rate of anything, from one to three miles an hour. 
I was seven days and eight nights in that coach. 
One does not stop to sleep, but merely to boil the kettle and feed. 
Sleep is almost an impossibility, as can be imagined. 
I noticed with amusement the mule which received the most flogging 
was christened ‘ Villoughby,’ or 4 Bobby Vite.’ 
There is a certain spice of excitement in the coach journey, because 
wheels come off, the coach upsets, and other small things happen which 
tend to disconcert one. 
The nightly amusement was to light a match occasionally and see 
the most extraordinary attitudes that everybody had got to in their 
broken slumbers ; all tumbled about like ninepins. 
The road itself is a mere track winding in and out of the scrubby 
bush which exists the best part of the way to Buluwayo. To venture 
off the track is very apt to lead to one being lost. At first one hardly 
believes that, but one finds in taking a few paces off the road how 
completely every trace of the road seems to have disappeared, and the 
country has no landmarks generally. 
There was a young fellow named Grey, a cousin of the administrator, 
who was on one of the last coaches before I went up. He strayed away 
from the coach, and to the lasting shame of the other men, they went 
on without him. When I was there natives had just found his body, 
found about 150 yards from the road, dead of course for want of water. 
I met the Gunners coming down from Buluwayo, and two of their 
men strayed away from the road and were lost. I believe they were 
afterwards found, one of them in a very bad state. 
One sometimes travels as much as eighty miles without reaching 
water, and when reached it is hardly worth having, being more liquid 
slime than o water. The contractor of the coach had done everything he 
could to provide water ; he had sunk wells at considerable expense 
along the road, but unsuccessfully, and several of the changing stations 
had to be abandoned. 
