There is nothing one more desires to know about a country, and especially a new country, than how one can travel through it. There was nothing about which, when contemplating a journey to South Africa, I found it more difficult to get proper information in England; so I hope that a few facts and hints will be useful to those who mean to make the tour, while to others they may serve to give a notion of the conditions which help or obstruct internal communication.

First, as to coast travel. There is no line of railway running along the coast, partly because the towns are small, as well as few and far between, partly because the physical difficulties of constructing a railway across the ridges which run down to the sea are considerable, but chiefly, no doubt, because the coasting steamers are able to do what is needed. The large vessels of the Castle Line and the Union Line run once a week between Cape Town and Durban (the port of Natal), calling at Port Elizabeth and East London, sometimes also at Mossel Bay. Thus one can find two opportunities every week of getting east or west in powerful ocean steamers, besides such chances as smaller vessels, designed for freight rather than for passengers, supply. From Durban there is one weekly boat as far as Delagoa Bay, a voyage of about twenty-four hours. From Delagoa Bay northward to Beira and Mozambique the traveller must rely either on the steamers of the German East Africa Line, which run from Hamburg through the Red Sea all the way to Durban making the entire voyage in about seven weeks, or on Messrs. Rennie's line, which ply from Durban to Delagoa Bay, Beira and Chinde. The drawback to these coast voyages is that the sea is apt to be rough between Cape Town and Durban, less frequently so between Durban and Beira, and that there is no sheltered Port between Cape Town and Delagoa Bay. At Port Elizabeth and at East London the large steamers lie out in the ocean, and passengers reach the land by a small tender, into which they are let down in a sort of basket, if there is a sea running, and are occasionally, if the sea be very high, obliged to wait for a day or more until the tender can take them off. Similar conditions have prevailed at Durban, where a bar has hitherto prevented the big liners, except under very favourable conditions of tide and weather, from entering the otherwise excellent port. Much, however, has recently been done to remove the Durban bar, and it is expected that the largest steamers will soon be able to cross it at high tide. At Delagoa Bay the harbour is spacious and sheltered, though the approach requires care and is not well buoyed and lighted. At Beira the haven is still better, and can be entered at all states of the tide. There is now a brisk goods trade, both along the coast between the ports I have mentioned, and from Europe to each of them.

Secondly, as to the railways. The railway system is a simple one. A great trunk-line runs north-eastward from Cape Town to a place called De Aar Junction, in the eastern part of the Colony. Here it bifurcates. One branch runs first east and then north-north-east through the Orange Free State and the Transvaal to Pretoria; the other runs north by east to Kimberley and Mafeking, and thence through Bechuanaland to Bulawayo.[38] The distance from Cape Town to Pretoria is ten hundred and forty miles, and the journey takes (by the fastest train) fifty-two hours. From Cape Town to Mafeking it is eight hundred and seventy-five miles, the journey taking about fifty hours; and from Mafeking to Bulawayo it is a little over five hundred more. From this trunk-line two important branches run southward to the coast, one to Port Elizabeth, the other to East London; and by these branches the goods landed at those ports, and destined for Kimberley or Johannesburg, are sent up. The passenger traffic on the branches is small, as people who want to go from the Eastern towns to Cape Town usually take the less fatiguing as well as cheaper sea voyage.

Three other lines of railway remain. One, opened in the end of 1895, connects Durban with Pretoria and Johannesburg; another, opened in 1894, runs from Delagoa Bay to Pretoria; a third, opened part of it in 1894 and the last part in 1899, connects Beira with Fort Salisbury, in the territory of the British South Africa Company.[39]

Of these railways the trunk-line with its branches was constructed by and is (except the parts which traverse the Orange Free State and the Transvaal) owned by the government of Cape Colony. It has latterly paid very well. The line from Durban to the Transvaal border at Charlestown belongs to the Natal government, and is also a considerable source of revenue. The rest of this line, from Charlestown northward through the Transvaal, is the property of a Dutch company, which also owns the line from Delagoa Bay to Pretoria and from Pretoria to the frontier of the Free State. The Beira railway belongs to a company controlled by the British South Africa Company, and is virtually a part of that great undertaking.

All these railways, except the Beira line, have the same gauge, one of three feet six inches. The Beira line has a two-foot gauge, but is now (1899) being enlarged to the standard gauge. Throughout South Africa the lines of railway are laid on steeper gradients than is usual in Europe: one in forty is not uncommon, and on the Natal line it is sometimes one in thirty, though this is being gradually reduced. Although the accommodation at the minor stations is extremely simple, and sometimes even primitive, the railways are well managed, and the cars are arranged with a view to sleep on the night journeys; so that one can manage even the long transit from Cape Town to Pretoria with no great fatigue. Considering how very thinly peopled the country is, so that there is practically no local passenger and very little local goods traffic, the railway service is much better than could have been expected, and does great credit to the enterprise of the people.

Railways have made an enormous difference, not to travel only, but to trade and to politics; for before the construction of the great trunk-line (which was not opened to Pretoria till 1892) the only means of conveyance was the ox-waggon. The ox-waggon needs a few words of description, for it is the most characteristic feature of South African travel. It is a long low structure, drawn by seven, eight, nine, or even ten yoke of oxen, and is surmounted (when intended to carry travellers) by a convex wooden frame and canvas roof. The animals are harnessed by a strong and heavy chain attached to the yoke which holds each pair together. The oxen usually accomplish about twelve miles a day, but can be made to do sixteen, or with pressure a little more. They walk very slowly, and they are allowed to rest and feed more hours than those during which they travel. The rest-time is usually the forenoon and till about four P.M. with another rest for part of the night. It was in these waggons that the Boers carried with them their wives and children and household goods in the great exodus of 1836. It was in such waggons that nearly all the explorations of South Africa have been made, such as those by the missionaries, and particularly by Robert Moffat and by Livingstone (in his earlier journeys), and such as those of the hunting pioneers, men like Anderson, Gordon-Cumming, and Selous. And to this day it is on the waggon that whoever traverses any unfrequented region must rely. Horses, and even mules, soon break down; and as the traveller must carry his food and other necessaries of camp life with him, he always needs the waggon as a basis of operations, even if he has a seasoned horse which he can use for two or three days when speed is required. Waggons have, moreover, another value for a large party; they can be readily formed into a laager, or camp, by being drawn into a circle, with the oxen placed inside and so kept safe from the attacks of wild beasts. And where there are hostile Kafirs to be feared, such a laager is an efficient fortress, from within which a few determined marksmen have often successfully resisted the onslaught of hordes of natives. An immense trade has been carried on by means of ox-waggons between the points where the railways end and the new settlements in Matabililand and Mashonaland. When I passed from Mafeking to Bulawayo in October, 1895, thousands of oxen were drawing hundreds of waggons along the track between those towns. When, a month later, I travelled from Fort Salisbury to Chimoyo, then the terminus of the Beira line, I passed countless waggons standing idle along the track, because owing to the locusts and the drought which had destroyed most of the grass, the oxen had either died or grown too lean and feeble to be able to drag the loads. Hence the cattle-plague which in 1896 carried off the larger part of the transport-oxen was a terrible misfortune, not only to the natives who owned these animals, but also to the whole northern region, which largely depends upon cattle transport for its food, its comforts, its building materials, and its mine machinery.

It is the character of the country that has permitted the waggon to become so important a factor in South African exploration, politics, and commerce. The interior, though high, is not generally rugged. Much of it—indeed, all the eastern and northern parts—is a vast rolling plain, across which wheeled vehicles can pass with no greater difficulty than the beds of the streams, sometimes deeply cut through soft ground, present. The ranges of hills which occur here and there are generally traversed by passes, which, though stony, are not steep enough to be impracticable. Over most of the southern half of the plateau there is no wood, and where forests occur the trees seldom grow thick together, and the brushwood is so dry and small that it can soon be cut away to make a passage. Had South Africa been thickly wooded, like the eastern parts of North America or some parts of Australia, waggon-travelling would have been difficult or impossible; but most of it is, like the country between the Missouri River and the Great Salt Lake, a dry open country, where the waggon can be made a true ship of the desert. This explains the fact, so surprising to most European readers of African travel and adventure, that wherever man can walk or ride he can take his moving home with him.

For rapid transit, however, the traveller who has passed beyond the railway is now not wholly dependent on the ox. Coaches, drawn sometimes by mules, sometimes by horses, run from some points on the railways to outlying settlements; they are, however, always uncomfortable and not always safe. They travel night and day, usually accomplishing from six to eight miles an hour on good ground, but much less where the surface is sandy or rugged. In the north and north-east of Cape Colony and in the Transvaal, as well as in Matabililand, horses are very little used either for riding or for driving, owing to the prevalence of a disease called horse-sickness, which attacks nearly every animal, and from which only about a quarter recover. This is one reason why so little exploration has been done on horseback; and it is a point to be noted by those who desire to travel in the country, and who naturally think of the mode by which people used to make journeys in Europe, and by which they make journeys still in large parts of South and of North America, as well as in Western Asia.

I have spoken of the "tracks" used by waggons and coaches; the reader must not suppose that these tracks are roads. There are few made roads in South Africa, except in the neighbourhood of Cape Town, Durban, Maritzburg, Graham's Town, and one or two other towns. Those in Natal are among the best. Neither are there (except as aforesaid) any bridges, save here and there rude ones of logs thrown across a stream bed. Elsewhere the track is merely a line across the veldt (prairie), marked and sometimes cut deep by the wheels of many waggons, where all that man has done has been to remove the trees or bushes. Here and there the edges of the steep stream banks have been cut down so as to allow a vehicle to descend more easily to the bottom, where during the rains the stream flows, and where during the rest of the year the ground is sandy or muddy. After heavy rain a stream is sometimes impassable for days together, and the waggons have to wait on the bank till the torrent subsides. At all times these water channels are troublesome, for the oxen or mules are apt to jib or get out of hand in descending the steep slope, and it is no easy matter to get them urged up the steep slope on the other side. Accidents often occur, and altogether it may be said that the dongas—this is the name given to these hollow stream channels—form the most exciting feature of South African travel (in places where wild beasts and natives are no longer dangerous) and afford the greatest scope for the skill of the South African driver.

Skilful he must be, for he never drives less than six span of oxen, and seldom less than three pairs of horses or mules (the Bulawayo coach had, in 1895, five pairs). It takes two men to drive. One wields an immensely long whip, while the other holds the reins. Both incessantly apostrophise the animals. It is chiefly with the whip that the team is driven; but if the team is one of mules, one of the two drivers is for a large part of the time on his feet, running alongside the beasts, beating them with a short whip and shouting to them by their names, with such adjectives, expletives, and other objurgations as he can command. Many Dutchmen do drive wonderfully well.

I have said nothing of internal water travel by river or lake, because none exists. There are no lakes, and there is not a river with water enough to float the smallest steamboat, except some reaches of the Limpopo River in the wet season. The only steamer that plies anywhere on a river is that which ascends the Pungwe River from Beira to Fontesvilla; it goes only as far as the tide goes, and on most of its trips spends fully half its time sticking on the sand-banks with which the Pungwe abounds. So far as I know, no one has ever proposed to make a canal in any part of the country.

From what has been said it will be gathered that there is no country where railways are and will be more needed than South Africa. They are the chief need of the newly settled districts, and the best means, next to a wise and conciliatory administration, of preventing fresh native outbreaks. Unfortunately, they will for a great while have no local traffic, because most of the country they pass through has not one white inhabitant to the square mile. Their function is to connect the coast with the distant mining centres, in which population has begun to grow. To lay them is, however, comparatively cheap work. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of a town, nothing has to be paid for the land. The gradients all through the interior plateau are comparatively easy, and the engineers have in Africa cared less for making their ascents gentle than we do in older countries. Even in the hilly parts of the Transvaal and Matabililand the ranges are not high or steep, and one can turn a kopje instead of cutting or tunnelling through it. Few bridges are needed, because there are few rivers.

A word as to another point on which any one planning a tour to South Africa may be curious—the accommodation obtainable. Most travellers have given the inns a bad name. My own experience is scanty, for we were so often the recipient of private hospitality as to have occasion to sleep in an inn (apart from the "stores" of Bechuanaland and Mashonaland, of which more hereafter) in four places only, Mafeking, Ladybrand, Durban, and Bloemfontein. But it seemed to us that, considering the newness of the country and the difficulty in many places of furnishing a house well and of securing provisions, the entertainment was quite tolerable, sometimes much better than one had expected. In the two Colonies, and the chief places of the two Republics, clean beds and enough to eat can always be had; in the largest places there is nothing to complain of, though the prices are sometimes high. Luxuries are unprocurable, but no sensible man will go to a new country expecting luxuries.