Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/333

 night the weather was chilly, although the afternoon was almost insufferably hot and dusty. All day yesterday we traveled through a country covered with scrubby trees; trees so bent and twisted that they looked as though they had rheumatism in every limb and joint. This morning we awoke in Rhodesia, and the country improved in character, though the land was still of the Arizona kind rather than of the Iowa or eastern Kansas kind. In Rhodesia we saw larger cornfields than we saw yesterday, but the fields were many miles apart. Corn is the staple crop all over Africa, but the corn I have seen was small Africa is an enormous country; when it comes to size, we must take off our hats to it. But nine hundred miles in the interior, you do not find a city like Chicago; the fourth or fifth city in the world, and built up from agriculture. Africa was known before Columbus discovered America; had it been as rich agriculturally as North America, the negroes would have been chased out by farmers as promptly as the Indians were chased out of North America. In Africa today there are negro tribes as wild as were the wildest tribes hundreds of years ago. There is here a tribe known as the Bushmen. Their language is a collection of clicks and grunts, these last, absent in the other African dialects, being said to bear a resemblance to the different cries of the baboon. The Bushman is so much like the baboon that he has no conception of right or wrong; it is as impossible to civilize him as it is impossible to civilize the monkey. He is the missing link between the monkey most like man, and the human animal. He can no more understand the rights of property than can the lion or the