Part 28

The Victoria Falls Hotel is owned by the railroad company, and when you visit the falls you will have no fault to find with it. Two hundred guests could be easily entertained, but I doubt if there are two dozen here now, as this is the dull season. Fall begins in this section with April, and visitors are most numerous during the cool weather. The most terrible cold-weather story I have heard here is that ice sometimes forms at night during the terrific cold prevailing in July and August.... The present temporary buildings of the Victoria Falls Hotel are to be replaced shortly with permanent buildings to cost $150,000. But in the present temporary buildings, guests willing to pay the price may have rooms with private bath, and during the worst weather the nights are cool. My bed is covered with a mosquito netting, as is the universal rule here, instead of putting netting at the windows and doors, but I have heard no mosquitos.... The Mr. Green referred to above has been looking at land in Africa with a view of buying for friends in England. English people have a great deal of cold, damp, foggy weather, and they hear much of the glorious sunshine of Africa; so Mr. Green’s report as to the possibilities of farming here will influence a good many. His report will not be very favorable. He has spent weeks in the different farming districts, and says he found farmers suffering from a three-years drouth. One man had a splendid prospect for corn, and thought the harvest would make him rich. Suddenly the hot winds came on, and in a few days the crop was ruined. This man offered his farm of 7,000 acres for sale at a dollar an acre; Mr. Green says he can buy millions of acres at that price, but will not advise his friends to take it, as the rainfall is uncertain, and the country infested with ants, ticks, flies dangerous to stock, etc. Possibly these pests will disappear in time; certain districts formerly dangerous are now free from the cattle-fly.... Mr. Green says that in many of the best sections of England, agricultural land can be bought at $50 an acre; the choicest at from $100 to $150 per acre. This statement particularly interested me because that is about the range at which land sells in the district where I live. I had always imagined that land in England sold at much higher prices than in Atchison county, Kansas, fifteen hundred miles west of the sea at New York.... Mr. Green says that last January, in his section of England, there were only five days without rain; last summer, he saw only fourteen bright days. There is plenty of sunshine and plenty of dry weather in Africa, but Mr. Green says he will not recommend the country to his neighbors.

MONDAY, MARCH 31.—This morning a dozen guests from the hotel, including the two travelers from Kansas, took a boat trip of fifteen or twenty miles on the Zambesi river above the falls. After a walk of half an hour we embarked in a large gasoline launch, and ascended the river until about noon, when we went ashore on an island, and explored it until lunch was ready at 12:30. A Hindu servant, with a native helper, accompanied us from the hotel, carrying two large hampers, and they prepared tea, and served an excellent lunch.... The Zambesi river above the falls is a wide, rambling affair, full of islands, and so shallow that the course of our launch was marked for several miles. When we finally landed, it was because we could go no further on account of a rapids. The river contains more water than the Missouri or Mississippi river, I should say, but is not navigable. At places it is said to be a mile and three-quarters wide. A river in this dry country is a novelty, and people make long excursions to see the Zambesi. On either side there is a line of hills which do not look unlike the hills bordering the Missouri river, but the valley is covered with trees and brush, as was the case in the Missouri “bottom” fifty years ago. On the Zambesi, the river valley seems to shift from one side to the other, instead of being confined always to the east side, as is the case with the Missouri river in its entire course. The trees along the Zambesi are of a stunted variety; along the African railways, a fairly large tree attracts almost as much attention as a river. The African trees are not large and graceful, as are our maples, oaks, walnuts, etc. One of the wonders here is a cream-of-tartar tree which measures ninety-eight feet in circumference. It is actually a dozen stunted trees growing in a bunch, but it is regarded as a wonder, and every visitor carves his initials in the bark.... Hippopotami are quite dangerous above the falls, as they upset boats in a spirit of mischief. They are being shot, and two were killed the day before we went up the river. Some time ago four tourists rowed on the river, in small boats. Hippos upset both boats, and two of the tourists went over the falls; the other two drifted against islands, and were rescued. It was a man and a woman who were rescued, strangers to each other, but the tragedy made them friends, and a few days ago they were married.... There are also crocodiles in the river, and they are also a nuisance. The man who ran the launch lives on the hotel farm, and says that since August last, crocodiles have captured twenty of the farm cattle. The cattle go to the river to drink, or to stand in the water during the heat of the day, and the crocodiles, some of which are eighteen feet long, drag them in. One of the soldiers from the camp near the hotel shot a crocodile while we were on the river.... I heard a curious discussion while we were eating luncheon on the island. An Englishman, a church member, had great respect for missionaries. All the others were residents of Africa, and their testimony was against them. One man said the superintendent of a penitentiary told him recently that ninety per cent of the convicts had been “converted” by missionaries. A mining man testified that negroes who had been under the influence of missionaries were nearly always less honest and less useful than natives who had had no such experience. A woman who lived on a South-African farm of 20,000 acres gave similar testimony, as did an army man who had served in Africa since the Boer war. Wherever I have gone, I have heard the missionary experiment denounced by white residents. I am taking no part in the controversy, but record as a remarkable fact that in Africa, China, Japan, India, etc., the testimony of white residents is nearly always against the missionary experiment. Every traveler remarks this, and comments on it.... This morning at 3 o’clock a rifle-shot rang out back of the hotel; one of the soldiers in the camp saw a leopard prowling around, and shot at it. A photographer living near the hotel has a cow, a calf and a donkey, and every night these are carefully locked up in pole fences that are leopard-proof.... This morning, when I awoke, I found a gentle rain falling in front of my room at the hotel. It turned out to be mist from the falls. This mist shifts with the wind, and in whatever direction we walk we run into it occasionally. At points quite distant from the falls it amounts to only a mist, or a very gentle rain, but at other places there is a heavy downpour. Along certain walls of the canyon below the cataract, dozens of waterfalls may be seen, and these are fed by the mists rising from the falls. There is seldom an hour during the day that a rainbow may not be seen from the hotel veranda. During moonlight nights a lunar rainbow may be seen which, experts say, shows one color not seen in the rainbow in daylight.... I was looking over the hotel register today, and ran across this entry: “Mrs. Annie E. McConnell, U. S. A.” I made some remark about finding a visitor from home, and the clerk said, laughingly:

“That woman became lost, and fourteen of us spent half of one night hunting her.”

The paths around the hotel and falls are very well defined, but travelers may easily become confused after nightfall.

TUESDAY, APRIL 1.—On a public desk at the Victoria Falls Hotel is kept a book marked “Suggestions.” Visitors are expected to write in it how they liked the falls, and suggest improvements of the service. I suggest that the average visitor does not care to spend four days here, as he is now compelled to do. I have found the last two days hanging heavily on my hands. The hotel at the falls is excellent, considering that it is a long way from its source of supplies, but trains are slow, and the cars dusty and crowded. The average train is composed of compartment cars, with a corridor running along one side. These corridors are so narrow that two persons cannot pass in them, and it is quite a task to go through a train in reaching the dining-car. I have never in my life seen such dirty cars as they have in South Africa, but this is partly owing to the terrible dust which prevails everywhere; another explanation is that, as a rule, one porter is expected to clean all the cars, and in some cases there is no porter. But the trainmen are always polite, and the tracks good. The dining-cars would be satisfactory were they not overcrowded. Traveling in South Africa has been easier than I expected, and the hotels better, but some of the dust in the railway cars might be easily removed; the addition of one Kaffir and one broom to each train would prove a great help.... Near the railway station live two men who deal in curios. Both are hunters, and both are interesting, and I spend a good deal of time with them; but they hate each other in a way that is scandalous. There never was such a thing as rivals in business getting along. They try hard not to say anything against each other, but their enmity crops out in every conversation. One of them is married, and has his wife and baby here, and a bishop will arrive tomorrow to baptize the baby. The other man is a bachelor, and is trying hard to catch a leopard while I am here, in an American steel trap. Leopards prowl about the hotel every night, and several hunters have told me that a leopard is a more dangerous animal than a lion. A leopard is like a bulldog: he hasn’t sense enough to know about danger.... The dreaded tsetse-fly is found in this vicinity, and cases of sleeping sickness are not unknown. I had always imagined that a man suffering with sleeping sickness became drowsy, and slept a great deal, but residents say that, while the patient is drowsy, he cannot sleep, and is very restless. They describe sleeping sickness as resembling consumption in many ways.... In the vicinity of the curio shop is a police camp, in charge of a corporal. The police patrol this district, and this morning I saw a white soldier start out on a trek to last two weeks. He rode a mule, as horses do not thrive in this country. Two pack donkeys were led by two natives; one a cook, and the other an enlisted police officer. The two natives will walk during the entire journey, and one of them will carry a gun. The patrol officer told me he would travel about eighteen miles a day, starting every morning about five, resting from nine to three, and then traveling from three until nightfall. He rarely makes more than three miles an hour, as the donkeys are slow, and the sand deep. Wherever you walk here, you are compelled to wade through sand; sand is the soil in most parts of Africa.... The patrol officer calls at every house he encounters, and asks the owner to report any disorder in his neighborhood. The patrol officer did not carry a tent, and I asked him why. “Because,” he answered, “we don’t need it; there will be no rain.” After the short rainy season, the welcome patter of rain is not heard for nine months.... The engineer who attends to the electric-light plant at the Victoria Falls Hotel is an intelligent young fellow who, with a brother, tried farming in a remote district in Rhodesia. They are about starving; they would have starved had not this brother gone to work. The other brother lives alone on the farm, and at intervals comes to the hotel for supplies provided by his brother. They will eventually desert their farm, without much doubt.... The young soldiers at the police camp are industrious hunters, and one of them says he lately killed a crocodile on the railroad bridge which crosses the Zambesi river below the falls. Crocodiles often travel considerable distances from the river; in returning to water, this one by accident struck the railroad track, and was following it across the bridge. The soldiers at the camp have all sorts of pets, including monkeys, which they pick up when young, and tame. They irrigate a considerable garden with water carried from the river by natives. This section must be a terrific place when the weather is at its worst; it is at its best now, and we stand it with difficulty.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2.—We said good-by to Victoria Falls this afternoon at 1:10, and left by train for the East Coast. Captain Moseley came to the station to see us, bringing all his hunting-dogs with him. Tomorrow morning at 3 o’clock he leaves for his new station in the interior, traveling in a wagon drawn by eight yoke of oxen and driven by two negroes. One of the negroes will sit up all night, to watch the grazing cattle, and guard the camp, and every afternoon he will sleep in the wagon. Ox teams travel very slowly, and the captain will walk most of the way, and hunt as he goes along. A negro servant accompanies him as cook, and will remain with him at the new station. His nearest white neighbors will be sixty miles away, and he does not expect to receive mail more than once in three months.... The train is not crowded, for a wonder, and we were given a double compartment thrown into one. Our traveling acquaintances, Mrs. Meek and her daughter Bettie, are still with us, and they have equally good accommodations. The South-African railway men take good care of you when it is possible.... The Bishop arrived at the Falls this morning, and baptized the photographer’s baby. A young curate came with him, and sat on the veranda and drank five highballs in quick succession. But the incident, like women smoking cigarettes in public, attracted no comment here. The Bishop is a genial man, and was soon surrounded by the women. The women dearly love an ordinary preacher, but to talk to a Bishop is an event in a church-worker’s life she never forgets.... During the dry season, full-grown cattle may be bought in parts of South Africa at $10 a head.... When I went into the hotel dining-room for breakfast this morning, the head waiter informed me in a whisper that a few fresh eggs had just been received from the hotel farm, and advised me to order soft-boiled eggs. This head waiter was born in the West Indies, and some of the men under him are Hindus, some of them negroes, and some of them Portuguese.... This is written on a piece of railroad track seventy-four miles long without a single curve, which is not a very big story: in Argentine, South America, there is a similar piece of track twice as long.... Possibly the reader imagines that ‘way over here I am a stranger in a strange land. As a matter of fact, I know nearly every passenger on this train; also, the conductor, and the waiters in the dining-car. I came up with the trainmen, and I spent four days with the passengers at Victoria Falls. All of them are either English or Colonials; no Americans except ourselves. Awhile ago, the conductor came into my compartment to visit awhile. He is an Englishman, but astonished me by saying that he likes German ships better than English ships. On English ships, he says, visitors are looked at with suspicion, whereas visitors are always welcome on a German ship. The conductor will go through with us to Beira, from Bulawayo, and has promised to do his best for us in the way of securing accommodations on the train. Englishmen who live out here soon have their sharp edges worn off, and become more agreeable.... There are certain American things that seem to be universal. Wherever we go, we see Eastman’s kodaks, National cash registers, Selig’s moving pictures, Colgate’s perfumes and soap, Chamberlain’s cough syrup, the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, Robert Chambers’s books, and Mr. Rockefeller’s gasoline.... It costs a good deal of money to have washing done over here, and we are wondering over the fact that the most reasonable laundry bill we have paid was at the Victoria Falls Hotel, where we expected nothing but highway robbery. When we registered at that hotel, the manager said he had two rooms reserved for us. They were double rooms, excellently located. Mrs. Meek and her daughter slept in one room, on two small beds, and they are grumbling because they were charged exactly what we were charged. It is so unusual for me to get the best of it that I am rather enjoying their indignation.... I have often heard of the extreme brightness of the nights in Africa. I cannot see that they are any brighter than the nights at home, except that there are a good many more prominent stars. In the north, we hear a great deal of the Southern Cross. We see it every night, but consider it insignificant. We are on the opposite side of the earth from Kansas, and the constellations we see there cannot be seen here. Pope, the Englishman, in describing great distance, wrote: “Far as the polar walk or milky way.” The people in Africa don’t understand the sentence: the milky way cannot be seen here, nor is our big dipper visible.... Tonight at ten o’clock, before going to bed, I went forward into the dining-car to get a drink of water, and found the car full of men drinking; a custom more common in this country than at home. The English laugh at our American habit of drinking ice-water. There is a certain Hot Water much worse, known as John Barleycorn, and Englishmen drink too much of it.... Poor Mrs. Atterbury, who has lived in South Africa nineteen years without a sight of her old home in St. Joseph, Missouri, says she longs to go home in order that she may again see pretty girls and babies. Mrs. Meek, our traveling acquaintance, who has always lived in the Transvaal, admits that pretty girls and babies are scarce here. They do not seem to thrive in this climate. Another peculiarity is that nearly all the women have black hair; a blonde with blue eyes is a great rarity in Africa. When a woman’s hair isn’t black in Africa, it is a fiery red.... The country between Victoria Falls and Bulawayo seems to be better developed than the country between Bulawayo and Mafeking. This afternoon, eighty or a hundred miles from the falls, we stopped at quite a coal-mining town, and saw great rows of coke ovens.

THURSDAY, APRIL 3.—In order to reach the sea at Beira, we were compelled to travel back to Bulawayo from Victoria Falls, and remain there from 7:30 A. M. until 10:30 P. M. We devoted the day to an automobile ride, and visited the Khami ruins, fifteen miles from the town.... Many centuries ago, Africa was inhabited by a race far superior in intelligence to the present native negroes. These people left the country hurriedly, for some reason, and it was one of their deserted towns we visited today. Some learned investigators say the ruined and deserted cities were built long before the Christian era, probably in the time of Solomon, and that the gold with which Solomon’s temple was adorned, amounting in value to ten million dollars, was mined in Africa. There seems to be no doubt that the gold mines in Rhodesia were worked many centuries ago; the workers in the mines today find unmistakable evidence of previous occupation.... The ruins we visited are scattered over a good many acres, along a river in which there is only stagnant water. Some of the more extensive buildings seem to have been used for defense. These are of stone, without mortar, and hundreds of feet of the walls are in as good condition as they ever were. There are great cisterns for holding water and grain, and modern builders say the cement was probably made on the ground, by a process of which they have no knowledge. Some of the cisterns, if cleaned out, would probably hold water today. Many relics have been picked up about the place, which may be seen in a museum at Bulawayo, and these indicate that the inhabitants were nearly as far advanced as the ancient Egyptians; they were able to smelt metals, and they had various kinds of domestic utensils, pottery, implements of war, etc. The people of Khami knew something of dentistry, of medicine, and of astronomy. Five hundred ruins or vestiges of former buildings are found in Rhodesia, extending over an area 800 by 700 miles, and all these are undoubtedly much older than Columbus, and probably older than Christ.... Recently ruins have been found in Thibet very much older than the ruins in Egypt, and, as investigations are more carefully made, the fact becomes more apparent that no one has yet been able to realize how old the world actually is.... In going to the Khami ruins, we passed hundreds of negro women walking into Bulawayo and carrying vegetables, chickens, firewood, etc. They were all naked above the waist, and invariably carried their loads on their heads; one woman carried a watermelon in this unusual way. The chickens were carried in rough home-made baskets.... The ruined city of Khami is in a wild and desolate country. On the way there, we saw only one or two farm-houses occupied by white men, and not many native huts. The country looked dry and worthless, and the roads were badly washed by torrential rains. The ruins are located in hills, and the day was so hot that we did not climb up to several of the most extensive-looking fortresses. Nothing is positively known about Khami; who the people were who built the town, when it was built, how long occupied, or when deserted, is pure conjecture.