14 THE LIFE OF JAMESON CHAPTER XXII THE WITWATERSRAND 'She builds in gold, and to the stars, As if she threatened heaven with wars.' I IN leisurely fashion the party trekked over the great plains of Matabeleland and Mashonaland, examining the rock formations, visiting the gold-mines, chatting with prospectors, and marvelling over the old workings of a vanished race of miners whose hopes, once as high as theirs, were now reduced to indistinguishable dust. In all the little settlements Rhodes and Jameson were besieged with welcomes and petitions, and Rhodes's cheque-book or a scrap of an old envelope in place of a cheque, or Jameson's unfailing banter, stilled the clamour of many a discontented pioneer. Making north-east from Salisbury, the travellers reached the high Inyanga plateau which hung over the coastlands beneath, and was cool with the sea breezes of the Southern Seas. On this eastern escarpment in a land of grassy downs where bracken and brambles grew in the hollows, Rhodes laid out a farm, with the delight of a countryman who satisfies at last a long-deferred desire, the instinct of his race. Then they went down the Pungwe River, and so VOL. II. |