Around Mother Africa Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #445)

times and enjoyed the outing a great deal. In the meantime I was joined by Joe Matthews from Basutoland and a few days after his arrival I insisted that we should leave for Dar Es Salaam. I joined the plane from Gaborone and took a back seat while Joe sat next to the pilot. On our way to Kasane on the Chobi River the 5 seater plane ran into a heavy storm and bobbed up and down like a cork in a turbulent sea. But the pilot was an experienced and confident navigator and skillfully manoevred his machine through the tempest. The landing strip at Kasane was waterlogged and after we had signalled to the hotel we landed on a firmer strip several miles away and waited there for the hotel manager to come and fetch us. The hotel as well as as the landing strip were each situated in a bush clearing and the two were linked by a track road that cut through the forest. The manager and his wife finally arrived shortly after sunset armed with rifles and reported that they had been held up on the way by rogue elephants. They were driving a van with an open back and on the return journey Joe and I sat in the back. A lioness crossed the road in front of the van and it was clear that I was no longer in the cosmopolitan city of Johannesburg governed by a City Council according to the rules of law. I was in another cosmopolitan centre where the survival of the fittest was the supreme law and where the tangled vegetation concealed all kinds of danger. The hotel was strategically situated at a point where almost the whole of Southern Africa met Angola, Bechuanaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia and South West Africa as all these