Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/374

 at us as though we were very odd specimens of humanity Soon after passing into Portuguese territory, the railroad ran through mountains, and the ride was interesting all the way to Beira, which town we reached at 9:30 This section is tropical, and bananas and cocoanuts grow in profusion. Near one town we saw hundreds of acres of growing corn; and it was much better corn than we had been seeing in Rhodesia and other parts of South Africa. It wasn't such corn as we grow, but it was probably half as good as an ordinary crop in eastern Kansas. I estimated one field I saw at four or five hundred acres; there were several others of fifty to a hundred acres. But the fields were widely separated. In eastern Kansas every foot of the land is devoted to crops, or pasture, or orchard, but here the occasional fields of corn were separated by miles of wild land. There is more rain in this section than in the vicinity of Bulawayo or Victoria Falls, and the stations on the railway more numerous As evening approached, we noticed that in the native villages, pots were boiling at open fires in front of the huts. Cook-stoves are unknown among the natives, and they have very little to eat except corn-meal mush. They make an intoxicating liquor out of corn-meal, and their holidays are largely devoted to revelry. The natives nearly all have cows, and drink a good deal of milk, first letting it sour, and become what we call clabber. Some of the greatest scientists claim that the free use of clabber-milk will preserve life well beyond a hundred years. The primitive races which live longest are liberal users of sour milk, which is claimed to destroy an intestinal