It was not his intelligence which he thought we underrated, but his dangerousness.

His reasons, shortly, were these: There were five or six of them to every white man; they were all, roughly speaking, of the same stock, with the same tribal beliefs; they had only just ceased being a warrior race, with a powerful military discipline; and, most important, they lived round the rim of the high-veld plateau, and if they combined could cut off the white man from the sea.

I pointed out to him that it would only be a matter of time before we opened the road again.

'Ay,' he said, 'but think of what would happen before then.

Think of the lonely farms and the little dorps wiped out of the map.