To Menelek in a Motor-Car

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. In the ordinary course of events, a preface is inserted in a book in order that the reader may have the satisfaction of beginning by a good long skip. No doubt the usual skip will be made, but in this case it will not be a long one, for I only propose to say a few words of pleading in extenuation of sentence, by explaining how the following pages came to be written.<br><br>Bede Bentley and I happened to be sharing the same house and both to be rather run down in health, so that a pipe and a yarn after dinner was the utmost exertion that we were capable of for some time.<br><br>I seemed to have always been a generation in front of Bentley, for the boys of my generation were leaving the various Catholic schools when he went to Beaumont. I went to Africa while Umbandine and Lobengula and Paul Kruger were very much alive, and before railways were thought of in the Transvaal, or Chartered Companies even hinted at. Bentley went there to assist in removing Paul Kruger, and found many changes, for Mashonaland and the Matabele country of my knowledge had disappeared, and in their place Rhodesia had appeared. It was the same thing with India and other parts of the world, always ten years or so of change; and ten years in new countries is equal often to a few centuries in old.<br><br>I had never been either to Somaliland or Abyssinia, and I grew much interested in his trip, which from explanatory comparisons with parts of Africa that I knew well I was able to understand.