To understand the material resources and economic conditions of South Africa, and, indeed, to understand the history of the country and the political problems which it now presents, one must first know something of its physical structure. The subject may seem dry, and those readers who do not care for it may skip this chapter. But it need not be uninteresting, and it is certainly not uninstructive. For myself, I can say that not only South African history, but also the prospects of South African industry and trade, were dark matters to me till I had got, by travelling through the country, an idea of those natural features of the southern part of the continent which have so largely governed the course of events and have stamped themselves so deeply upon the habits of the people. Some notion of these features I must now try to convey. Fortunately, they are simple, for nature has worked in Africa, as in America, upon larger and broader lines than she has done in Europe. The reader will do well to keep a map beside him, and refer[3] constantly to it, for descriptions without a map avail little.

Africa south of the Zambesi River consists, speaking broadly, of three regions. There is a strip of lowland lying along the coast of the Indian Ocean, all the way round from Cape Town, past Durban and Delagoa Bay and Beira, till you reach the mouth of the Zambesi. On the south, between Cape Town and Durban, this strip is often very narrow, for in many places the hills come, as they do at Cape Town, right down to the sea. But beyond Durban, as one follows the coast along to the north-east, the level strip widens. At Delagoa Bay it is some fifteen or twenty miles wide; at Beira it is sixty or eighty miles wide, so that the hills behind cannot be seen from the coast; and farther north it is still wider. This low strip is in many places wet and swampy, and, being swampy, is from Durban northward malarious and unhealthful in the highest degree. Its unhealthfulness is a factor of prime importance in what may be called the general scheme of the country, and has had, as we shall presently see, the most important historical consequences.

Behind the low coast strip rise the hills whose slopes constitute the second region. They rise in most places rather gradually, and they seldom (except in Manicaland, to be hereafter described) present striking forms. The neighbourhood of Cape Town is almost the only place where high mountains come close to the shore—the only place, therefore, except the harbour of St. John's far to the east, where there is anything that can be called grand coast scenery. As one travels inland the hills become constantly higher, till at a distance of thirty or forty miles from the sea they have reached an average height of from 3000 to 4000 feet, and sixty miles from 5000 to 6000 feet. These hills, intersected by valleys which grow narrower and have steeper sides the farther inland one goes, are the spurs or outer declivity of a long range of mountains which runs all the way from Cape Town to the Zambesi Valley, a distance of sixteen hundred miles, and is now usually called by geographers (for it has really no general name) the Drakensberg or Quathlamba Range. Their height varies from 3000 to 7000 feet, some of the highest lying not far to the north-east of Cape Town. In one region, however, several summits reach to 11,000 feet. This is Basutoland, the country that lies at the corner where Cape Colony, Natal, and the Orange Free State meet. It is a region remarkable in several respects, for its scenery as well as for its history, and for the condition of the native race that inhabits it, and I shall have to give some account of it in a later chapter. These mountains of Basutoland are the loftiest in Africa south of Kilimandjaro, and keep snow on their summits for several months in the year.

Behind the Quathlamba Range the country spreads out to the north and west in a vast tableland, sometimes flat, sometimes undulating, sometimes intersected by ridges of rocky hills. This is the third region. Its average height above the sea varies from 3000 to 5000 feet, and the hills reach in places nearly 6000. Thus the Quathlamba Range may be regarded as being really the edge of the tableland, and when in travelling up from the coast one reaches the water-shed, or "divide" (an American term which South Africans have adopted), one finds that on the farther or northerly side there is very little descent. The peaks which when seen from the slopes towards the coast looked high and steep are on this inner side insignificant, because they rise so little above the general level of the plateau. This plateau runs away inland to the west and north-west, and occupies seven-eighths of the surface of South Africa. It dips gently on the north to the valley of the Zambesi; but on the west spreads out over the Kalahari Desert and the scarcely less arid wastes of Damaraland, maintaining (except along the lower course of the Orange River) an altitude of from 3000 to 4000 feet above the sea, until within a comparatively short distance of the Atlantic Ocean.

The physical structure of the country is thus extremely simple. There is only one considerable mountain-chain, with a vast table-land filling the interior behind it, and a rough, hilly country lying between the mountains and the low belt which borders on the Indian Ocean. Let the reader suppose himself to be a traveller wishing to cross the continent from east to west. Starting from a port, say Delagoa Bay or Beira, on the Portuguese coast, the traveller will in a few hours, by either of the railways which run westward from those ports, traverse the low strip which divides them from the hill-country. To ascend the valleys and cross the water-shed of the great Quathlamba Range on to the plateau takes a little longer, yet no great time. Then, once upon the plateau, the traveller may proceed steadily to the west for more than a thousand miles over an enormous stretch of high but nearly level land, meeting no considerable eminence and crossing no perceptible water-shed till he comes within sight of the waves of the Atlantic. Or if he turns to the north-west he will pass over an undulating country, diversified only by low hills, till he dips slowly into the flat and swampy ground which surrounds Lake Ngami, itself rather a huge swamp than a lake, and descends very gradually from that level to the banks of the Zambesi, in the neighbourhood of the great Victoria Falls. In fact, this great plateau is South Africa, and all the rest of the country along the sea-margin a mere appendage to it. But so large a part of the plateau is, as we shall see presently, condemned by its dryness to remain sterile and very thinly peopled, that the interior has not that preponderating importance which its immense area might seem to give it.

It is not worth while to describe the minor ridges,—though some of them, especially in Cape Colony, are abrupt and high enough to be called Mountains,—for none has any great importance as affecting either material or historical conditions. The longest are those which run parallel to the dreary and almost uninhabited west coast, and form the terraces by which the great plateau sinks down to the margin of the Atlantic. Neither can I touch on the geology, except to observe that a great part of the plateau, especially in the northern part and towards the north-east end of the Quathlamba Range, consists of granite or gneiss, and is believed to be of very great antiquity, i.e., to have stood, as it now stands, high above the level of the sea from a very remote period of the earth's history. The rocks of the Karroo region are more recent. Nowhere in South Africa has any area of modern volcanic action, much less any active volcano, been discovered. More ancient eruptive rocks, such as greenstones and porphyries, are of frequent occurrence, and are often spread out in level sheets above the sedimentary beds of the Karroo and of the Basutoland and Free State ranges.

Finally, it must be noted that the coast has extremely few harbours. From Cape Town eastward and north-eastward there is no sheltered deep-water haven till one reaches that of Durban, itself troubled by a bar, and from Durban to the Zambesi no good ports save Delagoa Bay and Beira. On the other side of the continent, Saldanha Bay, twenty miles north of Cape Town, is an excellent harbour. After that the Atlantic coast shows none for a thousand miles.

So much for the surface and configuration of the country. Now let us come to the climate, which is a not less important element in making South Africa what it is.

The heat is, of course, great, though less great than a traveller from North Africa or India expects to find in such a latitude. Owing to the vast mass of water in the southern hemisphere, that hemisphere is cooler in the same latitude than is the northern. Cape Town, in latitude 34° S., has a colder winter and not so hot a summer as Gibraltar and Aleppo, in latitude 36° N. Still the summer temperature is high even at Durban, in latitude 30° S., while the northern part of the Transvaal Republic, and all the territories of the British South Africa Company, including Matabililand and Mashonaland, lie within the tropic of Capricorn, that is to say, correspond in latitude to Nubia and the central provinces of India between Bombay and Calcutta.

The climate is also, over most of the country, extremely dry. Except in a small district round Cape Town, at the southern extremity of the continent, there is no proper summer and winter, but only a dry season, the seven or eight months when the weather is colder, and a wet season, the four or five months when the sun is highest. Nor are the rains that fall in the wet season so copious and continuous as they are in some other hot countries; in many parts of India, for instance, or in the West Indies and Brazil. Thus even in the regions where the rainfall is heaviest, reaching thirty inches or more in the year, the land soon dries up and remains parched till the next wet season comes. The air is therefore extremely dry, and, being dry, it is clear and stimulating in a high degree.

Now let us note the influence upon the climate of that physical structure we have just been considering. The prevailing wind, and the wind that brings most of the rain in the wet season, is the east or south-east. It gives a fair supply of moisture to the low coast strip which has been referred to above. Passing farther inland, it impinges upon the hills which run down from the Quathlamba Range, waters them, and sometimes falls in snow on the loftiest peaks. A certain part of the rain-bearing clouds passes still farther inland, and scatters showers over the eastern part of the tableland, that is to say, over the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, eastern Bechuanaland, and the territories still farther north, toward the Zambesi. Very little humidity, however, reaches the tracts farther to the west. The northern part of Cape Colony as far as the Orange River, the western part of Bechuanaland, and the wide expanse of Damaraland have a quite trifling rainfall, ranging from four or five to ten inches in the whole year. Under the intense heat of the sun this moisture soon vanishes, the surface bakes hard, and the vegetation withers. All this region is therefore parched and arid, much of it, in fact, a desert, and likely always to remain so.

These great and dominant physical facts—a low coast belt, a high interior plateau, a lofty, rugged mountain-range running nearly parallel to, and not very far from, the shore of the ocean, whence the rainclouds come, a strong sun, a dry climate—have determined the character of South Africa in many ways. They explain the very remarkable fact that South Africa has, broadly speaking, no rivers. Rivers are, indeed, marked on the map—rivers of great length and with many tributaries; but when in travelling during the dry season you come to them you find either a waterless bed or a mere line of green and perhaps unsavoury pools. The streams that run south and east from the mountains to the coast are short and rapid torrents after a storm, but at other times dwindle to feeble trickles of mud. In the interior there are, to be sure, rivers which, like the Orange River or the Limpopo, have courses hundreds of miles in length. But they contain so little water during three-fourths of the year as to be unserviceable for navigation, while most of their tributaries shrink in the dry season to a chain of pools, scarcely supplying drink to the cattle on their banks. This is one of the reasons why the country remained so long unexplored. People could not penetrate it by following waterways, as happened both in North and in South America; they were obliged to travel by ox-waggon, making only some twelve or sixteen miles a day, and finding themselves obliged to halt, when a good bit of grass was reached, to rest and restore the strength of their cattle. For the same reason the country is now forced to depend entirely upon railways for internal communication. There is not a stream (except tidal streams) fit to float anything drawing three feet of water.

It is a curious experience to travel for hundreds of miles, as one may do in the dry season in the north-eastern part of Cape Colony and in Bechuanaland, through a country which is inhabited, and covered in some places with wood, in others with grass or shrublets fit for cattle, and see not a drop of running water, and hardly even a stagnant pond. It is scarcely less strange that such rivers as there are should be useless for navigation. But the cause is to be found in the two facts already stated. In those parts where rain falls it comes at one season, within three or four months. Moreover, it comes then in such heavy storms that for some hours, or even days, the streams are so swollen as to be not only impassable by waggons, but also unnavigable, because, although there is plenty of water, the current is too violent. Then when the floods have ceased the streams fall so fast, and the channel becomes so shallow, that hardly even a canoe will float. The other fact arises from the proximity to the east coast of the great Quathlamba chain of mountains. The rivers that flow from it have mostly short courses, while the few that come down from behind and break through it, as does the Limpopo, are interrupted at the place where they break through by rapids which no boat can ascend.