Chapter 7 - Page 2

were robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of Lorenço Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the "tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat difficult.

On her way from Lorenço Marquez to Beira our ship, the Kanzlar, kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern coast and against which the waves break with a report like the bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach" hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home. Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenço Marquez, was