---

CHAPTER VI.

EVENING ON THE HIGH VELD.

We leave the broken highway, channelled by rains and rutted by ox-waggons, and plunge into the leafy coolness of a great wood. Great in circumference only, for the blue gums and pines and mimosa-bushes are scarcely six years old, though the feathery leafage and the frequency of planting make a thicket of the young trees. The rides are broad and grassy as an English holt, dipping into hollows, climbing steep ridges, and showing at intervals little side-alleys, ending in green hills, with the accompaniment everywhere of the spicy smell of gums and the deep rooty fragrance of pines. Sometimes all alien woodland ceases, and we ride through aisles of fine trees, which have nothing save height to distinguish them from Rannoch or Rothiemurchus. A deer looks shyly out, which might be a roebuck; the cooing of doves, the tap of a woodpecker, even the hawk above in the blue heavens, have nothing strange. Only an occasional widow-bird with its ridiculous flight, an ant-heap to stumble over, and a clump of scarlet veld-flowers are there to mark the distinction. Here we have the sign visible of man’s conquest over the soil, and of the real adaptability of the land. With care and money great tracts of the high-veld might change their character. An English country-house, with deer-park and coverts and fish-ponds, could be created here and in many kindred places, where the owner might forget his continent. And in time this will happen. As the rich man pushes farther out from the city for his home, he will remake the most complaisant of countries to suit his taste, and, save for climate and a certain ineradicable flora and fauna, patches of Surrey and Perthshire will appear on this kindly soil.

With the end of the wood we come out upon the veld. What is this mysterious thing, this veld, so full of memories for the English race, so omnipresent, so baffling? Like the words “prairie,” “moor,” and “down,” it is easy to make a rough mental picture of. It will doubtless become in time, when South Africa gets herself a literature, a conventional counter in description. To-day every London shopboy knows what this wilderness of coarse green or brown grasses is like; he can picture the dry streams, the jagged kopjes, the glare of summer, and the bitter winter cold. It has entered into patriotic jingles, and has given a mise-en-scÈne to crude melodrama. And yet no natural feature was ever so hard to fully realise. One cannot think of a monotonous vastness, like the prairie, for it is everywhere broken up and varied. It is too great for an easy appreciation, as of an English landscape, too subtle and diverse for rhetorical generalities—a thing essentially mysterious and individual. In consequence it has a charm which the common efforts of mother-earth after grandiloquence can never possess. There is something homely and kindly and soothing in it, something essentially humane and fitted to the needs of human life. Climb to the top of the nearest ridge, and after a broad green valley there will be another ridge just the same: cross the mountains fifty miles off, and the country will repeat itself as before. But this sameness in outline is combined with an infinite variety in detail, so that we readily take back our first complaint of monotony, and wonder at the intricate novelty of each vista.

Here the veld is simply the broad green side of a hill, with blue points of mountain peeping over the crest, and a ragged brown road scarred across it. The road is as hard as adamant, a stiff red clay baked by the sun into porphyry, with fissures yawning here and there, so deep that often it is hard to see the gravel at the bottom. A cheerful country to drive in on a dark night in a light English cart, but less deadly to the lumbering waggons of the farmer. We choose the grass to ride on, which grows in coarse clumps with bare soil between. Here, too, are traps for the loose rider. A conical ant-heap with odd perforations, an ant-bear hole three feet down, or, most insidious of all, a meerkat’s hole hidden behind a tuft of herbage. A good pony can gallop and yet steer, provided the rider trusts it; but the best will make mistakes, and on occasion roll over like a rabbit. Most men begin with a dreary apprenticeship to spills; but it is curious how few are hurt, despite the hardness of the ground. One soon learns the art of falling clear and falling softly.

The four o’clock December sun blazes down on us, raising hot odours from the grass. A grey African hare starts from its form, a meerkat slips away indignantly, a widow-bird, coy and ridiculous like a flirtatious widow, flops on ahead. The sleepy, long-horned Afrikander cattle raise listless eyes as we pass, and a few gaudy butterflies waver athwart us. Otherwise there is no sound or sight of life. Flowers of rich colours—chrysanthemums, gentians, geraniums—most of them variants of familiar European species, grow in clumps so lowly that one can only observe them by looking directly from above. It is this which makes the veld so colourless to a stranger. There are no gowans or buttercups or heather, to blazon it like a spring meadow or an August moorland. Five yards off, and nothing is visible but the green stalks of grass or a red boulder.

At the summit of the ridge there is a breeze and a far prospect. The road still runs on up hill and down dale, through the distant mountains, and on to the great pastoral uplands of Rustenburg and the far north-west. On either side the same waving grass, now grey and now green as the wind breathes over it. Below is a glen with a gleam of water, and some yards of tender lawn on either bank. Farmhouses line the sides, each with its dam, its few acres of untidy crop land, and its bower of trees. Beyond rise line upon line of green ridges, with a glimpse of woods and dwellings set far apart, till in the far distance the bold spurs of the Magaliesberg stand out against the sky. A thin trail of smoke from some veld-fire hangs between us and the mountains, tempering the intense clearness of an African prospect. There is something extraordinarily delicate and remote about the vista; it might be a mirage, did not the map bear witness to its reality. It is not unlike a child’s conception of the landscape of Bunyan, a road running straight through a mystical green country, with the hilltops of the Delectable Mountains to cheer the pilgrim. And indeed the land is instinct with romance. The names of the gorges which break the mountain line—Olifants’ Poort, Crocodile Poort, Commando Nek—speak of war and adventure and the far tropics beyond these pastoral valleys. The little farms are all “Rests” and “Fountains,” the true nomenclature of a far-wandering, home-loving people. The slender rivulet below us is one of the topmost branches of the great Limpopo, rising in a marsh in the wood behind, forcing its way through the hills and the bush-veld to the north, and travelling thence through jungles and fever-swamps to the Portuguese sea-coast. The road is one of the old highways of exploration; it is not fifty years since a white man first saw the place. And yet it is as pastoral as Yarrow or Exmoor; it has the green simplicity of sheep-walks and the homeliness of a long-settled rustic land. In the afternoon peace there is no hint of the foreign or the garish; it is as remote as Holland itself from the unwholesome splendours of the East and South.

No landscape is so masterful as the veld. Broken up into valleys, reclaimed in parts by man, showing fifty varieties of scene, it yet preserves one essential character. For, homely as it is, it is likewise untamable. There are no fierce encroachments about it. A deserted garden does not return to the veld for many years, if ever. It is not, like the jungle, the natural enemy of man, waiting for a chance to enter and obliterate his handiwork, and repelled only by sleepless watching. Rather it is the quiet spectator of human efforts, ready to meet them half-way, and yet from its vastness always the dominant feature in any landscape. Its normal air is sad, grey, and Quakerish, never flamboyant under the brightest sun, and yet both strenuous and restful. The few red monstrosities man has built on its edge serve only to set off this essential dignity. For one thing, it is not created according to the scale of man. It will give him a home, but he will never alter its aspect. Let him plough and reap it for a thousand years, and he may beautify and fructify but never change it. The face of England has altered materially in two centuries, because England is on a human scale,—a parterre land, without intrinsic wildness. But cultivation on the veld will always be superimposed: it will remain, like Egypt, ageless and immutable—one of the primeval types of the created world.

But, though dominant, it is also adaptable. It can, for the moment, assume against its unchangeable background a chameleon-like variety. Sky and weather combine to make it imitative at times. Now, under a pale Italian sky, it is the Campagna—hot, airless, profoundly melancholy. Again, when the mist drives over it, and wet scarps of hill stand out among clouds, it is Dartmoor or Liddesdale; or on a radiant evening, when the mountains are one bank of hazy purple, it has borrowed from Skye and the far West Highlands. On a clear steely morning it has the air of its namesake, the Norwegian fjelds,—in one way the closest of its parallels. But each phase passes, the tantalising memory goes, and we are back again upon the aboriginal veld, so individual that we wonder whence arose the illusion.

A modern is badly trained for appreciating certain kinds of scenery. Generations of poets and essayists have so stamped the “pathetic fallacy” upon his soul that wherever he goes, unless in the presence of a Niagara or a Mount Everest, he runs wild, looking for a human interest or a historical memory. This is well enough in the old settled lands, but on the veld it is curiously inept. The man who, in Emerson’s phrase, seeks “to impress his English whim upon the immutable past,” will find little reward for his gymnastics. Not that there is no history of a kind—of Bantu wars, and great tribal immigrations, of wandering gold-seekers and Portuguese adventurers, of the voortrekker and the heroic battles in the wilds. But the veld is so little subject to human life that had ThermopylÆ been fought in yonder nek, or had Saint Francis wandered on this hillside, it would have mastered and obliterated the memories. It has its history; but it is the history of cosmic forces, of the cycle of seasons, of storms and suns and floods, the joys and sorrows of the natural world.

Men dreamed of it and its wealth long ago in Portugal and Holland. They have quarrelled about it in London and Cape Town, fought for it, parcelled it out in maps, bought it and sold it. It has been subject for long to the lusts and hopes of man. It has been larded with epithets; town-bred folk have made theories about it; armies have rumbled across it; the flood of high politics has swept it. But the veld has no memory of it. Men go and come, kingdoms fall and rise, but it remains austere, secluded, impenetrable, “the still unravished bride of quietness.”

As one lives with it the thought arises, May not some future civilisation grow up here in keeping with the grave country? The basis of every civilisation is wealth—wealth to provide the background of leisure, which in turn is the basis of culture in a commercial world. Our colonial settlements have hitherto been fortuitous. They have fought a hard fight for a livelihood, and in the process missed the finer formative influences of the land. When, then, civilisation came it was naturally a borrowed one—English with an accent. But here, as in the old Greek colonies, we begin de novo, and at a certain high plane of life. The Dutch, our forerunners, acquired the stamp of the soil, but they lived on the barest scale of existence, and were without the aptitude or the wealth to go farther. Our situation is different. We start rich, and with a prospect of growing richer. On one side are the mining centres—cosmopolitan, money-making, living at a strained pitch; on the other this silent country. The time will come when the rich man will leave the towns, and, as most of them are educated and all are able men, he will create for himself a leisured country life. His sons in turn will grow up with something autochthonous in their nature. For those who are truly South Africans at heart, and do not hurry to Europe to spend their wealth, there is a future, we may believe, of another kind than they contemplate. All great institutions are rooted and grounded in the soil. There is an art, a literature, a school of thought implicit here for the understanding heart,—no tarnished European importation, but the natural, spontaneous fruit of the land.

As we descend into the glen the going underfoot grows softer, the flinty red clay changes to sand and soon to an irregular kind of turf. At last we are on the stream-bank, and the waving grasses have gone. Instead there is the true meadow growth, reeds and water-plants and a species of gorgeous scarlet buck-bean; little runnels from the farm-dams creep among the rushes, and soon our horses’ feet are squelching through a veritable bog. Here are the sights and sounds of a Hampshire water-meadow. Swallows skim over the pools; dragon-flies and bees brush past; one almost expects to see a great trout raise a sleepy head from yonder shining reach. But there are no trout, alas! none, I fear, nearer than Natal; only a small greenish barbel who is a giant at four to the pound. The angler will get small satisfaction here, though on the Mooi River, above Potchefstroom, I have heard stories of a golden-scaled monster who will rise to a sea-trout fly. As we jump the little mill-lades, a perfect host of frogs are leaping in the grass, and small bright-eyed lizards slip off the stones at our approach. But, though the glen is quick with life, there is no sound: a deep Sabbatical calm broods over all things. The cry of a Kaffir driver from the highroad we have left breaks with an almost startling violence on the quiet. The tall reeds hush the stream’s flow, the birds seem songless, even the hum of insects is curiously dim. There is nothing for the ear, but much for the eye and more for the nostril. Our ride has been through a treasure-house of sweet scents. First the pines and gum-trees; then the drowsy sweetness of the sunburnt veld; and now the more delicate flavour of rich soil and water and the sun-distilled essences of a thousand herbs. What the old Greek wrote of Arabia the Blessed might fitly be written here, “From this country there is a smell wondrous sweet.”

Lower down the glen narrows. The stream would be a torrent if there were more water; but the cascades are a mere trickle, and only the deep green rock-pools, the banks of shingle, and the worn foot of the cliff, show what this thread can grow to in the rains. A light wild brushwood begins, and creeps down to the very edge of the stream. Twenty years ago lions roamed in this scrub; now we see nothing but two poaching pariah dogs. We pass many little one-storeyed farms, each with a flower-garden run to seed, and some acres of tangled crops. All are deserted. War has been here with its heavy hand, and a broken stoep, empty windows, and a tumbled-in roof are the marks of its passage. The owners may be anywhere—still on commando with Delarey, in Bermuda or Ceylon, in Europe, in camps of refuge, on parole in the towns. Great sunflowers, a foot in diameter, sprawl over the railings, dahlias and marigolds nod in the evening sunshine, and broken fruit-trees lean over the walks. Suddenly from the yard a huge aasvogel flaps out—the bird not of war but of unclean pillage. There is nothing royal in the creature, only obscene ferocity and a furtive greed. But its presence, as it rises high into the air, joined with the fallen rooftrees, effectively drives out Arcady from the scene. We feel we are in a shattered country. This quiet glen, which in peace might be a watered garden, becomes suddenly a desert. The veld is silent, but such secret nooks will blab their tale shamelessly to the passer-by.

The stream bends northward in a more open valley, and as we climb the ridge we catch sight of the country beyond and the same august lines of mountain. But now there is a new feature in the landscape. Bushes are dotted over the far slope, and on the brow cluster together into something like a coppice. It is a patch of bush-veld, as rare on our high-veld as are fragments of the old Ettrick forest in Tweeddale. Two hundred miles north is the real bush-veld, full of game and fevers, the barrier between the tropical Limpopo and these grassy uplands. Seen in the splendour of evening there is a curious savagery about that little patch, which is neither veld nor woodland, but something dwarfish and uncanny. That is Africa, the Africa of travellers; but thus far we have ridden through a countryside so homely and familiar that we are not prepared for a foreign intrusion. Which leads us to our hope of a new civilisation. If it ever comes, what an outlook it will have into the wilds! In England we look to the sea, in France across a frontier, even in Russia there is a mountain barrier between East and West. But here civilisation will march sharply with barbarism, like a castle of the Pale, looking over a river to a land of mists and outlaws. A man would have but to walk northward, out of the cities and clubs and the whole world of books and talk, to reach the country of the oldest earth-dwellers, the untamable heart of the continent. It is much for a civilisation to have its background—the Egyptian against the Ethiopian, Greek against Thracian, Rome against Gaul. It is also much for a race to have an outlook, a far horizon to which its fancy can turn. Even so strong men are knit and art is preserved from domesticity.

We turn homeward over the long shoulders of hill, keeping to the track in the failing light. If the place is sober by day, it is transformed in the evening. For an hour the land sinks out of account, and the sky is the sole feature. No words can tell the tale of a veld sunset. Not the sun dipping behind the peaks of Jura, or flaming in the mouth of a Norwegian fiord, or sinking, a great ball of fire, in mid-Atlantic, has the amazing pageantry of these upland evenings. A flood of crimson descends on the world, rolling in tides from the flagrant west, and kindling bush and scaur and hill-top, till the land glows and pulsates in a riot of colour. And then slowly the splendour ebbs, lingering only to the west in a shoreless, magical sea. A delicate pearl-grey overspreads the sky, and the onlooker thinks that the spectacle is ended. It has but begun; for there succeed flushes of ineffable colour,—purple, rose-pink, tints of no mortal name,—each melting imperceptibly into the other, and revealing again the twilight world which the earlier pageant had obscured. Every feature in the landscape stands out with a tender, amethystine clearness. The mountain-ridge is cut like a jewel against the sky; the track is a ribbon of pure beaten gold. And then the light fades, the air becomes a soft mulberry haze, the first star pricks out in the blue, and night is come.

Here is a virgin soil for art, if the art arises. In our modern history there is no true poetry of vastness and solitude. What there is is temperamental and introspective, not the simple interpretation of a natural fact. In the old world, indeed, there is no room for it: a tortured, crowded land may produce the aptitude, but it cannot give the experience. And the new lands have had no chance to realise their freshness: when their need for literature arose, they have taken it second-hand. The Australian poet sings of the bush in the rococo accents of Fleet Street, and when he is natural he can tell of simple human emotions, but not of the wilds. For the chance of the seeing eye has gone. He is not civilised but de-civilised, having borrowed the raiment of his elder brother. But, if South African conditions be as men believe, here we have a different prospect. The man who takes this country as his own will take it at another level than the pioneer. The veld will be to him more than a hunting-ground, and the seasons may be viewed from another than a commercial standpoint. If the art arises, it will be an austere art—with none of the fatuities of the picturesque, bare of false romance and preciosities, but essentially large, simple, and true. It will be the chronicle of the veld, the song of the cycle of Nature, the epic of life and death, and “the unimaginable touch of time.” Who can say that from this land some dew of freshness may not descend upon a jaded literature, and the world be the richer by a new Wordsworth, a more humane Thoreau, or a manlier Senancour?

Once more we are in the wood, now a ghostly place with dark aisles and the windless hush of evening in the branches. The flying ants are coming out of the ground for their short life of a night. The place is alive with wings, moths and strange insects, that go white and glimmering in the dusk. The clear darkness that precedes moonrise is over the earth, so that everything stands out clear in a kind of dark-green monochrome. Something of an antique dignity, like an evening of Claude Lorraine, is stealing into the landscape. Once more the veld is putting on an alien dress, till in this fairyland weather we forget our continent again. And yet who shall limit Africa to one aspect? Our whole ride has been a kaleidoscope of its many phases. Hot and sunburnt, dry grasses and little streams, the red rock and the fantastic sunset. And on the other side the quiet green valleys, the soothing vista of blue hills, the cool woods, the water-meadows, and the twilight. It is a land of contrasts—glimpses of desert and barbarism, memories of war, relics of old turmoil, and yet essentially a homeland. As the phrase goes, it is a “white man’s country”; by which I understand a country not only capable of sustaining life, but fit for the amenities of life and the nursery of a nation. Whether it will rise to a nation or sink to a territory rests only with its people. But it is well to recognise its possibilities, to be in love with the place, for only then may we have the hope which can front and triumph over the many obstacles. The first darkness is passing, a faint golden light creeps up the sky, and suddenly over a crest comes the African moon, bathing the warm earth in its cold pure radiance. This moon, at any rate, is the peculiar possession of the land. At home it is a disc, a ball of light; but here it is a glowing world riding in the heavens, a veritable kingdom of fire. No virgin huntress could personify it, but rather some mighty warrior-god, driving his chariot among trampled stars. It lights us out of the wood, and on to the highroad, and then among the sunflowers and oleanders of the garden. The night air is cool and bracing, but soft as summer; and as we dismount our thoughts turn homeward, and we have a sudden regret. For in this month and at this hour in that other country we should be faring very differently. No dallying with zephyrs and sunsets; but the coming in, cold and weary, from the snowy hill, and telling over the peat-fire the unforgettable romance of winter sport.

December 1901.

---

CHAPTER VII.

IN THE TRACKS OF WAR.

I.

We left Klerksdorp in a dust-storm so thick and incessant that it was difficult to tell where the houses ended and the open country began. The little town, which may once have been a clean, smiling place, has been for months the corpus vile of military operations. A dozen columns have made it their destination; the transport and supplies of the whole Western Army have been congested there, with the result that the town lands have been rubbed bare of grass, the streets furrowed into dust-heaps, and the lightest breeze turned into a dust-tornado. Our Cape carts rattled over the bridge of the Schoon Spruit—“Caller Water,” as we might translate it in Scots, but here a low and muddy current between high banks—and, climbing a steep hill past the old town of Klerksdorp, came out of the fog into clearer veld, over which a gale of wind was blowing strongly. The desert was strewn with empty tins, which caught the sun like quartz; stands of barbed wire were everywhere on the broad uneven highway; little dust devils spouted at intervals on to the horizon. The place was like nothing so much as a large deserted brick-field in some Midland suburb. There is one feature of the high veld which has not had the attention it deserves—I mean the wind. Ask a man who has done three years’ trekking what he mostly complains of, and he will be silent about food and drink, the sun by day and the frost by night, but he is certain to break into picturesque language about the wind. The wind of winter blows not so unkindly as persistently. Day and night the cheek is flaming from its buffets. There is no shelter from scrub or kopje, for it is a most cunning wind, and will find a cranny to whistle through. Little wrinkles appear round blinking eyes, the voice gets a high pitch of protest, and a man begins to walk sideways like a crab to present the smallest surface to his enemy. And with the wind go all manner of tin-cans, trundling from one skyline to another with a most purposeful determination. Somewhere—S.S.W. I should put the direction—there must be a Land of Tin-cans, where in some sheltered valley all the dÉbris of the veld has come to anchor.

About ten o’clock the wind abated a little, and the road passed into a country of low hills with a scrub of mimosa thorn along the flats. The bustard, which the Boers have so aptly named “korhaan” or scolding cock, strutted by the roadside, a few hawks circled about us, and an incurious secretary-bird flapped across our path. The first water appeared,—a melancholy stream called Rhenoster Spruit,—and the country grew hillier and greener till we outspanned for lunch at a farmhouse of some pretensions, with a large dam, a spruit, and a good patch of irrigated land. The owner had returned, and was dwelling in a tent against the restoration of his homestead. A considerable herd of cattle grazed promiscuously on the meadow, and the farmer with philosophic calm was smoking his pipe in the shade. Apparently he was a man of substance, and above manual toil; for though he had been back for some time there was no sign of getting to work on repairs, such as we saw in smaller holdings. Fairly considered, this repatriation is a hard nut for the proud, indolent Boer, for it means the reversal of a life’s order. His bywoners are scattered, his native boys refuse to return to him; there is nothing for the poor man to do but to take pick and hammer himself. Sooner or later he will do it, for in the last resort he is practical, but in the meantime he smokes and ponders on the mysteries of Providence and the odd chances of life.

In the afternoon our road lay through a pleasant undulating land, with green patches along the streams and tracts of bush relieving the monotony of the grey winter veld. Every farmhouse we passed was in the same condition,—roofless, windowless, dams broken, water-furrows choked, and orchards devastated. Our way of making war may be effective as war, but it inflicts terrible wounds upon the land. After a campaign of a dozen bloody fights reconstruction is simple; the groundwork remains for a new edifice. But, though the mortality be relatively small, our late methods have come very near to destroying the foundations of rural life. We have to build again from the beginning; we have to face questions of simple existence which seem strange to us, who in our complex society rarely catch sight of the bones of the social structure. To be sure there is hope. There is a wonderful recuperative power in the soil; the Boer is simpler in habits than most countrymen; and it is not a generation since he was starting at the same rudiments. Further, our own settlers will have the same beginnings, and there is a chance of rural communities, Boer and British, being more thoroughly welded together, because they can advance pari passu from the same starting-point. But to the new-comer the situation has a baffling oddness. It seems strange to be doling out the necessaries of life to a whole community, to be dealing with a society which must have been full of shades and divisions like all rural societies, as a featureless collection of units. Yet it is probable that the Boers themselves are the last to realise it. The people who crowded to the doors of the ruined farms as we passed were on the whole good-humoured, patient, and uncomplaining. They had set about repairing the breaches in their fortunes, crudely but contentedly. At one farm we saw a curious Arcadian sight in this desert which war had made. Some small Boer children were herding a flock of sheep along a stream. A little girl in a sunbonnet was carrying a lamb; two brown, ragged, bare-legged boys were amusing themselves with a penny whistle. To the children war and reconstruction alike can only have been a game; and hope and the future are to the young.

From Klerksdorp to Wolmaranstad the distance is some fifty miles, and it was almost nightfall before we descended with very weary cattle the long hill to our outspan. The country was one wide bare wold, the sky a soft glow of amber; and there was nothing between amber earth and amber sky save one solitary korhaan, scolding in the stillness. I do not know who the first Wolmarans may have been, but he built a stad very like a little Border town—all huddled together and rising suddenly out of the waste. The Makasi Spruit is merely a string of muddied water-holes, but in the darkness it might have been the “wan water” of Liddel or Yarrow. We camped in one of the few rooms that had still a roof, and rid ourselves of the dust of the road in an old outhouse in the company of a facetious monkey and a saturnine young eagle. When we had warmed ourselves and dined, I began to like Wolmaranstad, and, after a moonlight walk, I came to the conclusion that it was a most picturesque and charming town. But Wolmaranstad, like Melrose, should be seen by moonlight; for in the morning it looked little more than a collection of ugly shanties jumbled together in a dusty patch of veld.

II.

On the 12th of August, in the usual dust-storm, we started for Lichtenburg. There is no highroad, but a series of wild cross-country paths merging constantly in farm-roads. No map is quite reliable, and local information is fallacious. The day being the festival of St Grouse, we shot conscientiously all morning with very poor success. The game was chiefly korhaan, and he is a hard bird to get on terms with. About the size of a blackcock, and as slow on the wing, he looks an easy mark; but if stalked, he has a habit of rising just out of range, and repeating the performance till he has lured you a mile from your waggon, when he squawks in triumph and departs into the void. The orthodox way is to ride round him in slowly narrowing circles—a ruse which seems to baffle his otherwise alert intelligence. The country was rolling veld dotted with wait-a-bit thorn-bushes; the farmhouses few but large; the roads heavy with sand. In one hill-top farm, well named Uitkyk, we found an old farmer and his son-in-law, who invited us to enter. The place was in fair order, being out of the track of columns, tolerably furnished, and with the usual portrait of the Reverend Andrew Murray on the wall. The farmer had no complaints to make, being well-to-do and too old to worry about earthly things; but the son-in-law, a carpenter by trade, was full of his grievances. The neighbourhood, being in ruins, was crying for his services, he said, but there was no material in the country to work with. Building material was scarce in Johannesburg and Pretoria; how much scarcer it must be in Wolmaranstad! This just complaint was frequent on our journey; for the Transvaal, served by its narrow-gauge single-line railways choked with military traffic, is badly equipped with the necessaries of reconstruction, and many willing workmen have to kick their heels in idleness.

We outspanned at midday near some pools of indifferent water, which our authorities had enthusiastically described as an abundant water-supply. There was a roofless farm close by, where a kind of hut of biscuit-tins had been erected, in which a taciturn young woman was nursing a child. There was also a boy of about sixteen in the place who had coffee with us, and took us afterwards to stalk korhaan with a rifle. He was newly home from commando, full of spirit and good-humour, and handled longingly the rifle which the law forbade him to possess. All afternoon we passed roofless farmhouses crowded with women and children, and in most cases the farmer was getting forward in the work of restoration. Dams and water-furrows were being mended, some kind of roof put on the house, waggons cobbled together, and in many cases a good deal of ploughing had been done. The country grew bleaker as we advanced, trees disappeared, huge wind-swept downs fell away on each side of the path, and heavy rain-clouds came up from the west. The real rains begin in October, but chill showers often make their appearance in August, and I know nothing more desolate than the veld in such a storm. By-and-by we struck the path of a column, ploughed up by heavy gun-carriages, and in following the track somehow missed our proper road. The darkness came while we were yet far from our outspan, crawling up a great hill, which seemed endless. At the top a fine sight awaited us, for the whole country in front seemed on fire. A low line of hills was tipped with flame, and the racing fires were sweeping into the flats with the solid regularity of battalions. A moment before, and we had been in Shelley’s

now we were in the midst of light and colour and elfish merriment. To me there is nothing solemn in a veld-fire—nothing but madness and fantasy. The veld, so full at other times of its own sadness, the

becomes demented, and cries an impish defiance to the austere kings who sit in Orion. The sight raised our spirits, and we stumbled down the long hillside in a better temper. By-and-by a house of a sort appeared in the valley bottom, and a dog’s bark told us that it was inhabited. To our relief we found that we had actually struck our outspan, Korannafontein, having approached it from the opposite side. The Koranna have long since gone from it, and the sole inhabitant was a Jew storekeeper, a friendly person, who assisted us to doctor our very weary horses. The ways of the Jew are past all finding out. Refuse to grant him a permit for himself and goods, and he says nothing; but he is in occupation months before the Gentile, unless that Gentile comes from Aberdeen. Our friend had his store stocked, and where he got the transport no man knows. He spoke well of the neighbourhood, both of Boer and native. The natives here, he said, are civilised. I asked him his definition of civilisation. “They speak Dutch,” he said,—an answer worth recording. We camped for the night behind what had once been the wool-shed. The floor of the tent was dirty, and, foolishly, I sent a boy to “mak skoon.” He made “skoon” by digging up dust with a shovel and storing it in heaps in different corners. About midnight the rain fell heavily, and a little later a great wind rose and put those dust-heaps in circulation. I awoke from dreams of salmon-fishing with a profound conviction that I had been buried under a landslip. I crawled hastily through a flap followed by a stream of dust, and no ventilation could make that tent habitable, so that in the morning we awoke with faces like colliers, and throats as dry as the nether millstone.

From Korannafontein to Lichtenburg is something over forty miles, so we started at daybreak and breakfasted at a place called Rhenosterput, where some gentleman sent a Mauser bullet over our heads to remind us of his presence. The country was downland, very full of Namaqua partridge and the graceful spur-winged plover, a ranching country, for the streams had little fall and less water. At midday we outspanned at a pretty native village called Rooijantjesfontein, with a large church after the English village pattern, and a big dam lined with poplars. The life of a commercial missionary, who bought a farm when land was cheap and had it cultivated by his congregation, is a pleasant one: he makes a large profit, spends easy days, and returns early to his native Germany. It is a type I have little patience with, for it discredits one of the most heroic of human callings, and turns loose on society the slim Christian native, who brings Christianity and civilisation alike into discredit. We were now out of the region of tracks and on the main road to Lichtenburg, and all afternoon we travelled across the broad shallow basin of the Hartz River with our goal full in view on a distant hill-top. Far off on our right we saw a curious sight—a funeral waggon with a train of mourners creeping slowly across the veld. The Boers, as we heard from many sources, are exhuming the dead from different battle-fields, and bringing them, often from great distances, to the graveyards on their own homesteads. An odd sombre task, not without its grandeur; for to the veld farmer, as to the old Roman, there are Lares and Penates, and he wishes at the last to gather all his folk around him.

III.

Lichtenburg, as I have said, stands on a hill-top, but when one enters he finds a perfect model of a Dutch village. The streets are lined with willows and poplars, and seamed with water-furrows, and all the principal buildings surround a broad village green on which cattle were grazing. Seen in the morning it lost nothing of its attractiveness; and it dwells in my memory as a fresh clean place, looking over a wide upland country,—a place where men might lead honest lives, and meet the world fearlessly. It has its own relics of war. The court-house roof and walls are splashed with bullets, relics of Delarey’s fight with the Northumberland Fusileers. General Delarey is himself the principal inhabitant. He owns much land in the neighbourhood, and his house stands a few miles out on the Mafeking road. From this district was drawn all that was most chivalrous and resolute in the Boer forces; and the name of their leader is still a synonym with lovers of good fighting men for the finest quality of his race.

The Zeerust road is as bad going for waggons as I have ever seen. It runs for miles through a desert where the soil is as black as in Lancashire, and a kind of coaly dust rises in everlasting clouds. We started late in the day, so that sunset found us some distance from water, in a featureless country. We were to outspan at the famous Malmani Oog—the eye of the Malmani; but a fountainhead is not a good goal on a dark night to ignorant travellers. Shortly after dusk we rode on ahead to look for the stream. Low slopes of hills rose on all sides, but nowhere could we see a gleam or a hollow which might be water. The distance may have been short, but to a hungry and thirsty man it seemed endless, as one hill after another was topped without any result. We found a fork in the road, and took the turn to the left as being more our idea of the way. As it happened we were trekking straight for the Kalahari Desert, and but for the lucky sound of a waggon on the other road might have been floundering there to-day. We turned aside to ask for information, and found we were all but at the Oog, which lay in the trees a hundred yards off. The owner of the waggon was returning to Lichtenburg with a sick wife, whom he had taken to Zeerust for a change. He had been a road surveyor under the late Government, had served on Delarey’s staff, and had been taken prisoner. A quiet reserved man with dignified manners, he answered our questions without complaint or petulance. There is something noble in travel when pursued in this stately leisure. The great buck-waggon, the sixteen solemn oxen lumbering on, the master walking behind in the moonlight, have an air of patriarchal dignity, an elder simplicity. I suppose fifteen to twenty miles might be a good day’s march, but who shall measure value by miles? It is the life for dreams, for roadside fires, nights under the stars, new faces studied at leisure, good country talk, and the long thoughts of an unharassed soul. Let us by all means be up and doing, setting the world to rights and sounding our own trumpet; but is the most successful wholly at ease in the presence of great mountains and forests, or men whose lives share in the calm cycle of nature?

The night in tents was bitterly cold, and the morning bath, taken before sunrise in the springs of Malmani, was the most Arctic experience I have ever met. We left our drivers to inspan and follow, and set off down the little stream with our guns. There are hours which live for ever in the memory—hours of intense physical exhilaration, the pure wine of health and youth, when the mind has no thoughts save for the loveliness of earth, and the winds of morning stir the blood to a heavenly fervour. No man who has experienced such seasons can be other than an optimist. Dull nights in cities, heartless labours with pen and ink, the squalid worries of business and ambition, all are forgotten, and in the retrospect it is those hours which stand up like shining hill-tops—the type of the pure world before our sad mortality had laid its spell upon it. It is not pleasure—the word is too debased in human parlance; nor happiness, for that is for calm delights. Call it joy, that “enthusiasm” which is now the perquisite of creeds and factions, but which of old belonged to the fauns and nymphs who followed Pan’s piping in the woody hollows of Thessaly. I have known and loved many streams, but the little Malmani has a high place in my affections. The crystal water flowed out of great reed-beds into a shallow vale, where it wound in pools and cataracts to a broad ford below a ruined mill. Thence it passed again into reed-beds fringed with willows and departed from our ken. There was a bamboo covert opposite full of small singing birds; the cries of snipe and plover rose from the reed-beds, and the fall of water, rarest of South African sounds, tinkled like steel in the cold morning air. We shot nothing, for we saw nothing; the glory of the scene was all that mortal eye could hold at once. And then our waggons splashed through the ford, and we had perforce to leave it.

We took a hill road, avoiding the detour by Malmani Drift, and after some hours in a country of wooded glens, came into the broad valley of the Klein Marico. The high veld and its scenery had been left far behind. Something half tropical, even in this mid-winter, was in the air of those rich lowlands. After the bleak uplands of Lichtenburg it was pleasant to see good timber, the green of winter crops, and abundant runnels of water. The farm-houses were larger and in fair repair,—embowered, too, in orange-groves, with the golden fruit bright among the glossy leaves. Blossom was appearing in every orchard; new and strange birds took the place of our enemy the korhaan; and for the first time on our journey we saw buck on the slopes. The vale was ringed with stony tree-clad hills like the Riviera, and in the hot windless noon the dust hung in clouds about us, so that, in spite of water and greenery, my impression of that valley is one of thirst and discomfort. Zeerust[11] is a pretty village close under the hills, with tree-lined streets,—a prosperous sleepy place, with no marks of the ravages of war. The farmers, too, are a different stock from the high-veld Boers; they get their living more easily, and in their swarthy faces and slouching walk one cannot read the hard-bitten spirit which inspired the men of Botha and Delarey. They seemed on good terms with their new masters. We attended a gymkhana given by the South African Constabulary, and the Dutch element easily predominated in the crowd which watched the races. A good-humoured element, too, for the men smoked and criticised the performances in all friendliness, while their womenkind in their Sunday clothes thronged to the marquees for tea.

IV.

The Rustenburg road runs due east through a fine defile called Klein Marico Poort, and thence in a country of thick bush for twenty miles to the ford of the Groot Marico. We started before dawn, and did not halt for breakfast till the said ford, by which time the sun was high in the heavens and we were very hot, dusty, and hungry. Lofty wooded hills rose to the north, and not forty miles off lay the true hunting-veld, with koodoo, water-buck, and hippopotamus. Bird life was rich along the road—blue jays, rollers, and the handsome malicious game-bird which acts as scout to the guinea-fowl, and with his harsh call informs them of human presence. The farms were small and richly watered, with laden orange-groves and wide ruined verandahs. The people of Zeerust had spoken with tears in their eyes of the beautiful condition of this road, but we found it by far the worst in our travels. It lay deep in sand, was strewn with ugly boulders, and at one ford was so impossible that we had to make a long detour over virgin veld. The Great Marico, which, like all streams in the northern watershed, joins the Limpopo, and indeed forms its chief feeder, is a muddy tropical water, very unlike the clear Malmani. Beyond it the country becomes bare and pastoral again, full of little farms, to which the bulk of the inhabitants had returned. It was the most smiling country we had seen, for bush-veld has an ineradicable air of barbarism, but a green open land with white homesteads among trees is the true type of a settled country. Apricot blossom lay like a soft haze on the landscape. The young grass was already springing in the sheltered places, the cold dusty winds had gone, and a forehint of spring was in the calm evening.

We spent the night above the Elands River, a very beautiful full water, almost on the site of the battle. The Elands River fight seems to have slipped from the memory of a people who made much of lesser performances; but to soldiers it is easily the ThermopylÆ of the war. Five hundred or so of Australians of different regiments, with a few Rhodesians, were marching to join another force, when they were cut off at Elands River by 3000 Boers. They were invited to surrender, and declined. A small number took up a position beside the stream; the remainder held a little ridge in the centre of the amphitheatre of hills. For several days they toiled at dug-outs—terrible days, for they were shelled continually from the whole rim of the amphitheatre. One relieving force from the west retired in despair; a relieving force from the east was deceived by false heliograms, and went away, believing the work accomplished. Then came the report that they had surrendered; and then, after some fifteen days, they were found by Lord Kitchener, still holding the forlorn post. It was a mere sideshow, but to have been there was worth half the clasps in the campaign. More shells were fired into that little place than into Mafeking, and the courage of the few by the river who passed up water in the night to their comrades is beyond praise. The Colonials will long remember Elands River. It was their own show: without generalship or orders, against all the easy traditions of civilised warfare, the small band followed the Berserker maxim, and vindicated the ancient dignity of arms. In the morning we went over the place. The dug-outs were still mostly intact, and in a little graveyard beneath rude crosses slept the heroic dead.

A few miles farther on and the summit of a ridge was reached, from which the eye looked over a level valley to the superb western line of the Magaliesberg. Straight in front was the cleft of Magata’s Nek, beyond which Rustenburg lay. The western Magaliesberg disappoints on closer acquaintance. The cliffs prove to be mere loose kranzes, the glens are waterless, the woods are nothing but barren thorn. But seen from afar in the clear air of dawn, when the darkness is still lurking in the hollows and the blue peaks are flushed with sunrise, it is a fairyland picture, a true mountain barrier to an enchanted land. Our road swung down a long slope to the Coster River, where we outspanned, and then through a sandy wilderness to the drift of the Selons. From this it climbed wearily up to the throat of the nek, a dull tract of country with few farms and no beauties. The nek, too, on closer view has little to commend it, save the prospect that opens on the other side. The level green plateau of Rustenburg lay before us, bounded on the north by a chain of kopjes, and on the south by the long dark flanks of the Magaliesberg as it sweeps round to the east. A few miles and the village itself came in sight, with a great church, as at Wakkerstroom, standing up like some simple rural cathedral over the little houses. Rustenburg was always the stronghold of the straitest sect of the Boers; and in the midst of the half-tropical country around, this sweep of pasture, crowned with a white kirk, had something austere and Puritan in its air,—the abode of a people with their own firm traditions, hostile and masterful towards the world. The voortrekker having fought his way through the Magaliesberg passes, outspanned his tired oxen on this pleasant upland, and called it his “city of rest.” And it still looks its name, for no orchards and gardens can make it otherwise than a novelty in the landscape—sober, homely, and comforting, like some Old Testament Elam where there were twelve wells of water and three-score and ten palm-trees, or the “plain called Ease” wherein Christian “walked with much content.”

V.

We took up our quarters at a farm a little way south of the town in the very shadow of the mountains. It was a long, low, rambling house called Boschdaal, with thick walls and cool passages. All around were noble gum-trees; a clear stream ran through the garden, which even at this season was gay with tropical flowers; and the orchard was heavy with oranges, lemons, and bananas. A little conical hill behind had a path made to its summit, whence one had a wide prospect of the Magaliesberg and the whole plateau. There were sheer cliffs in the background, with a waterfall among them; and between them and the house were some miles of park-like country where buck came in the morning. The rooms were simply but pleasantly furnished; the walls a forest of horns; and the bookcases full of European classics, with a great abundance of German story-books for children, telling how wicked Gretchen amended her ways, or little Hans saved his pennies. Altogether a charming dwelling-place, where a man might well spend his days in worthy leisure, shooting, farming, gardening, and smoking his pipe in the evening, with the sunset flaming over the hills.

We spent two nights in Rustenburg, visiting in the daytime a horse depot to which a number of brood mares had been brought for winter grazing, and paying our respects to a neighbouring chief, Magata, who lives in a stad from which many town councils might learn a lesson of cleanliness and order. The natives are as rich as Jews from the war, owning fine spans of oxen and Army Service Corps waggons, and altogether disinclined to stir themselves for wages. This prosperity of the lower race must be a bitter pill for the Boer to swallow, as he drives in for his rations with a team of wretched donkeys, and sees his former servants with buck-waggons and cattle. We watched strings of Burghers arriving at the depot, and at night several fires in the neighbouring fields told of their outspans. Most of them were polite and communicative: a very few did their business in sulky silence. There was one man who took my fancy. Originally he must have been nearly seven feet high, but a wound in the back had bent him double. He had long black hair, and sombre black eyes which looked straight before him into vacancy. He had a ramshackle home-made cart and eight donkeys, and a gigantic whip, of which he was a consummate master. A small boy did his business for him, while he sat hunched up on his cart speaking hoarsely to his animals, and cracking his whip in the air,—a man for whom the foundations of the world had been upset, and henceforth, like Cain, a dweller apart.

On the third morning we started regretfully, for Pretoria was only two days distant. This was the pleasantest stage in our journey: the air was cool and fine, the roads good, water abundant, and a noble range of mountains kept us company. This is the tobacco-land of the Transvaal, whence comes the Magaliesberg brand, which has a high reputation in South Africa. There are no big farms but a great number of small holdings, richly irrigated and populous—the stronghold of Mr Kruger in former times, for he could always whistle his Rustenburgers to his will. Now and then a pass cleft the mountain line on our right, and in the afternoon we came in sight of the great gap through which the Crocodile River forces its passage. Farther east, and at a higher altitude, lay Silikat’s Nek, which is called after Mosilikatse. It was approaching sunset as we crossed Commando Nek, which is divided from Crocodile Poort by a spur of mountain, and looked over the Witwatersberg rolling south to the Rand and the feverish life of cities. High up on a peak stood a castellated blockhouse, looking like a peel tower in some old twilight of Northumbrian hills, and to the left and right the precipitous cliffs of the Magaliesberg ran out to the horizon. At the foot of the pass we forded the Magalies River, a stream of clear water running over a bed of grey-blue stones, and in another half-hour we had crossed the bridge of the Crocodile and outspanned on the farther bank.

The rivers unite a mile away, and the cleft of the Poort to which the twin streams hurried stood out as black as ink in the moonlight. Far up on the hillside the bush was burning, and the glare made the gorge like the gate of a mysterious world, guarded by flames and shadows. This Poort is fine by daylight, but still not more than an ordinary pass; but in the witching half-light it dominated the mind like a wild dream. After dinner we set out over the rough ground to where a cliff sank sheer from the moonlight into utter blackness. We heard the different notes of the two rivers—the rapid Magalies and the sedater Crocodile; and then we came to the bank of the united stream, and scrambling along it found ourselves in the throat of the pass. High walls of naked rock rose on either hand, and at last, after some hard walking, we saw a space of clear star-sown sky and the land beyond the mountains. I had expected a brawling torrent; instead, I found a long dark lagoon sleeping between the sheer sides. In the profound silence the place had the air of some underground world. The black waters seemed to have drowsed there since the Creation, unfathomably deep—a witch’s caldron, where the savage spirits of the hills might show their faces. Even as we gazed the moon came over the crest: the cliff in front sprang into a dazzling whiteness which shimmered back from the lagoon below. Far up on the summit was a great boulder which had a far-away likeness to an august human head. As the light fell on it the resemblance became a certainty: there were the long locks, the heavy brows, the profound eyes of a colossal Jove. Not Jove indeed, for he was the god of a race, but that elder deity of the natural man, grey-haired Saturn, keeping his ageless vigil, quiet as a stone, over the generations of his children. Forgotten earth-dwellers, Mosilikatse and his chiefs, Boer commandos, British yeomanry,—all had passed before those passionless eyes, as their successors will pass and be forgotten. And in the sense of man’s littleness there is comfort, for it is part of the title of our inheritance. The veld and the mountains continue for ever, austerely impartial to their human occupants: it is for the new-comer to prove his right to endure by the qualities which nature has marked for endurance.

August 1902.

---

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WOOD BUSH.

Some thirty miles east of Pietersburg, the most northerly railway station in the Transvaal, the Leydsdorp coach, which once a-week imperils the traveller’s life, climbs laboriously into a nest of mountains, and on the summit enters an upland plateau, with shallow valleys and green forest-clad slopes. Twenty miles on and the same coach, if it has thus far escaped destruction, precipitously descends a mountain-side into the fever flats which line the Groot Letaba and the Letsitela. The Leydsdorp road thus cuts off a segment of a great irregular oblong, which is bounded on the south by the spurs of the Drakensberg, which the Boers call the Wolkberg or Mountain of Cloud, and on the north divided by the valley of the Klein Letaba from the Spelonken. It is a type of country found in patches in the de Kaap mountains, and in parts of Lydenburg; but here it exists in a completely defined territory of perhaps 700 square miles, divided sharply from high veld and bush veld. The average elevation may be 5000 feet, and, though cut up into valleys and ridges, it preserves the attributes of a tableland, so that on all sides one can journey to an edge and look down upon a wholly different land. But the geographical is the least of its distinctions. The climate has none of the high-veld dryness or the low-veld closeness, but is humid and sharp and wholesome all the year round. Mists and cool rains abound, every hollow has its stream, and yet frost is rarely known. Its vegetation, the configuration of its landscape, the soil itself, are all things by themselves in South Africa. Fever, horse-sickness, and most cattle diseases are unknown. It is little explored, for till quite lately the native tribes were troublesome, and only the poorer class of Boer squatted on its occupation farms, and, though a proclaimed gold-field for some years, the uitlander who strayed there had rarely an eye for its beauty. The unfortunate man who took his life in his hands and journeyed by coach to Leydsdorp forgot the landscape in the perils of the journey, and in all likelihood forgot most things in fever at the end of it. It remained, therefore, a paradise with a few devotees, a place secret and strange, with a beauty so peculiar that the people who tried to describe it were rarely believed. A delight in the Wood Bush is apt to spoil a man for other scenery. The high veld seems tame and monotonous, the bush veld an intolerable desert, and even the mountain glories of the Drakensberg something crude and barbarous after this soft, rich, and fascinating garden-land.

The mountains come into view a little way from Pietersburg, but there are many miles of featureless high veld to be covered before the foothills are reached. It was midsummer when I first travelled there, and the dusty waterless plains were glazed by the hot sun. The Sand River, filled with acres of fine sand, but not a drop of moisture, was not a cooling object in the scene, and the dusty thorn scrub offered no shade. But insensibly the country changed. Bold kopjes of rose-red granite appeared on the plain, and at a place called Kleinfontein the road turned sharply south, and we were confronted with a noble line of crags running out like a buttress from the mountains. At Smith’s Drift the road swerved east again, and a long valley appeared before us running up into the heart of the hills. A clear stream came down it, and the sides were dotted in bush-veld manner with redwood and sikkelboom and syringa, and a variety of thorns, of which the Kaffir waak-en-beetje and the knopjes-doorn were the prettiest. Occasionally the dull green of the olivienhout appeared, and when the bush ceased aloes raised their heads among the rocks. Everywhere the mimosa was in bloom, and the afternoon air was laden with a scent like limes. Towards the top the valley flattened out into upland meadows, little farms appeared dotted on the hillsides, and the yellow mimosa blossom on the slopes was so indistinguishable from gorse that in the half-light I could have sworn I was among Cumberland fells, and not on the edge of the tropics and 300 miles from the sea. We assisted a Boer farmer to slay a pig, had coffee afterwards with his family, and slept the sleep of the just on a singularly hard piece of ground under a magnificent sky of stars, being roused once to give a drink to a belated member of the S.A.C.

Shortly after dawn next day we toiled to the top of a long hill, and entered the Wood Bush. A high blue ridge—the Iron Crown mountain behind Haenertsburg—rose before us, which changed with the full light to a dazzling green, studded in the kloofs with patches of dark forest. Glimpses of other forest-crowned hills appeared in the turnings of the path; and when we had exhausted the horizon we had time to look at the roadside. It was a perfectly new country. The soil was as red as Devonshire, the steep sides oozed with little runnels of water. Thickly grassed meadows of the same dazzling yet delicate green fell away to the little hollows, where copses took their place, and now and then a small red farm showed in a group of alien gum-trees. It was so novel as to be almost unbelievable. And then in the meadows little shrubs like dwarf hazels appeared, which on closer view showed themselves as tree-ferns,—old gnarled veterans and young graceful saplings. The herbage, too, was gay with flowers, as gay as an English meadow save that for daisies there were patches of tall arums and lilies, and for buttercups a superb golden-belled campanula. I am no botanist and am not ashamed of it, but on that morning I regretted a wasted youth and many unprofitable hours given to the classics. By-and-by we descended on the little township of Haenertsburg, a cluster of rondhavels and the tents of an S.A.C. post. On leaving we crossed a torrent, the Bruderstroom, which later becomes the Groot Letaba and flows through miles of feverish deserts to join the Olifants and thence to the Limpopo. It was a true highland stream, with deep dark-blue pools, and great swirls of icy grey water sweeping round crags or stretching out into glistening shallows. On the high veld it would be dignified by the name of river, and be shorn and parcelled into a thousand water-furrows. But here it was but one of many, for every hollow had its limpid stream slipping out of sight among the tall grasses.

Beyond Haenertsburg the Iron Crown mountain comes into full view, with its green sides scarred and blackened in places with the works of gold-seekers. To the left rose the crags of the Wolkberg, and far behind the blue lines of the Drakensberg itself. To the north the true Wood Bush country appeared, an endless park laid out as if by a landscape gardener, with broad dales set with coppices, and little wood-covered hills. “A park-like country,” is the common travellers’ phrase for the bush veld; but there the grass is rank and ugly, the trees isolated thorns, and the whole land flat and waterless. Here was a true park, like Chatsworth or Windsor, so perfectly laid out that one could scarcely believe that it was not a work of man. For surely a park is properly man’s work, a flower of civilisation, which nature aids but rarely contrives. Yet when she does contrive, how far is the result beyond our human skill! For an exception the mountain-tops were free from mist; the land lay bathed in a cool morning light, and the scent of a thousand aromatic herbs—wormwood, southernwood, a glorified bog-myrtle, musk, and peppermint—rose from the wayside. Bracken was as plentiful as on a Scots moor, and the old familiar fragrance was like a breath of the sea. We breakfasted in a water-meadow, where a spring of cold water stole away through a forest of tree-ferns, arums, giant orchises, and the tall blue agapanthus. As we smoked our morning pipes and watched a white eagle and a brace of berghaans circling in the blue, I vowed that here at last had been found the true Hesperides.

A few miles on and we were on the farther edge. At a place called Skellum Kloof the road dips sharply over the crest, and down three break-neck miles to the Groot Letaba. Behind lay the green garden-land; in front, a hundred miles of broken country, fading in the far distance into misty flats. The little range of the Murchison hills ran out at right angles; away to the north the peaks of Majajie’s mountains, with the Spelonken beyond, blocked the horizon. As far as the eye could see, the faint blue line of the Rooi Rand, the Portuguese border, was just distinguishable from the sky, with the fingers of the little Lebombo breaking the thin line to the south. One forgot the weary miles of swamp and fever that lay between, and saw only a glorious sunlit plain, which might have been full of clear rivers and vineyards and white cities, instead of thorn and Kaffir huts and a few ugly mining shanties. The Wood Bush on its eastern side is a series of soft green folds, with the superb evergreen forest in every kloof. At first sight the woods look like hazel copses, and you plunge gaily in to your disaster. Below Skellum Kloof is a little wooded glen, into which I descended for water, and at one time there were doubts of my ever emerging again. The place was matted with monkey-creepers, mosses, huge ferns, and a thick undergrowth around the trunks of great trees. Yellowwoods, 200 feet high, essenwood, sneezewood, stinkwood, most of them valuable timber-trees, and all with a glossy dark foliage, rose out of the jungle to the confusion of the poor inhabitant below. I noticed some giant royals, some curious orchids, and quantities of maidenhair fern and the graceful asparagus creeper. But soon I noticed little beyond the exceeding toilsomeness of the passage. Every step had to be fought for, the place was hot to suffocation, and I was in mortal fear of snakes. Also, I had no desire to meet a bushbuck ram, than whom no fiercer fellow for his size exists, at close quarters in his native haunts. I kept down-hill, listening for water, and by-and-by rolled over a red scaur into an ice-cold pool, which was the only pleasing thing in the forest. Happily in returning I struck a native path, and reached open country in greater comfort. Two boys who had been sent to find me—Basutos, and, like all Basutos, fools in a thick wood— succeeded in getting lost themselves, and had to be searched for.

Hereabouts, when my ship comes home, I shall have my country house. There is a piece of flat land, perhaps six acres square, from which a long glen runs down to the Letaba. There I shall have my dwelling. In front there will be a park to put England to shame, miles of rolling green dotted with shapely woods, and in the centre a broad glade in which a salmon-river flows in shallows and falls among tree-ferns, arums, and bracken. There may be a lake, but I am undecided. In front I shall have a flower-garden, where every temperate and tropical blossom will appear, and in a sheltered hollow an orchard of deciduous trees, and an orange plantation. Highland cattle, imported at incredible expense, will roam on the hillsides. My back windows will look down 4000 feet on the tropics, my front on the long meadow vista with the Iron Crown mountain for the sun to set behind. My house will be long and low, with broad wings, built of good stone and whitewashed, with a thatched roof and green shutters, so that it will resemble a prazo such as some Portuguese seigneur might have dwelt in in old times. Within it will be cool and fresh, with stone floors and big fireplaces, for the mists are chill and the winds can blow sharply on the mountains. There will be good pictures and books, and quantities of horns and skins. I shall grow my own supplies, and make my own wine and tobacco. Rides will be cut in the woods, and when my friends come to stay we shall drive bushbuck and pig, and stalk tiger-cats in the forest. There will be wildfowl on my lake, and Lochleven trout in my waters. And whoever cares to sail 5000 miles, and travel 1500 by train, and drive 50 over a rough road, will find at the end of his journey such a palace as Kubla Khan never dreamed of. The accomplishment is difficult, but not, I trust, impossible. Once upon a time, as the story goes, a Dutchman talked with a predikant about the welfare of his soul. “You will assuredly be damned,” said the predikant, “and burn in hell.” “Not so,” said the Dutchman. “If I am so unfortunate as to get in there, I shall certainly get out again.” “But that is folly and an impossibility,” said the predikant. “Ah,” said the other with confidence, “wait and see: I shall make a plan.” Ek sal ’n plan maak—this must be my motto, and I shall gratefully accept all honourable suggestions.

The country is full of wealth—mines, agriculture, forestry, and pasturage. The presence of payable gold, both in quartz and banket, is undoubted, and some improvement in the roads, possibly a light railway, and the completion of the Selati line may provide for the rise of Haenertsburg from a very little dorp into a flourishing township. There is magnificent pasturage for stock, for cattle diseases are few and horse-sickness is unknown. It has been said that one acre in the Wood Bush will carry an ox, and though this is an exaggeration, it is certain that the rich herbage will maintain three or four times the head of stock which can be run on the high veld. The grass in spring is very early, and in the worst part of winter the forests can be resorted to, so that hand-feeding is almost unknown. The grass is sour veld, but any extensive pasturing would soon bring it into the sweet veld class. Once it were properly grazed down, it would be also a natural sheep country of high value. The soil is a clayey red loam, and the moist climate provides perfect conditions for most seed crops. Tobacco would thrive well—as well perhaps as on the lower slopes along the Groot Letaba, where Mr Altenroxel produces excellent pipe tobacco and a respectable cigar. It is a paradise for vegetables, and all hardy fruits and a few sub-tropical ones could be made to flourish in the rich straths. It is a land for small holdings, save for a few larger farms on the hill-tops, and here might arise a community of British settlers, making a new England out of a country which already possesses the climate of the West Highlands and the configuration of a Sussex park.

At Skellum Kloof we descended from the uplands to an elevation of about 2000 feet, a type of scenery half-way between the wholesome high veld and the pernicious flats of the Lower Letaba. I take that descent to be all but the worst in the Transvaal, second only to the appalling cliff over which the road from Lydenburg drops to the Olifants. The grades are so steep that with a waggon it is necessary to outspan all animals but the two wheelers, and lock the wheels tightly. With a two-wheeled Cape cart to attempt it is to court destruction. Just at the foot is an awesome corner, and then a straight slope to the Letaba, a stream about the size of the Spean and not unlike it. There is a fine salmon pool below the ford, in which I swam circumspectly, being in dread of stray crocodiles. The valley has nothing of that raw unfinished look so common in South African landscapes. The peaks rise in noble contours from long stretches of forest and Kaffir tillage. As we crossed, the mist drooped over the hills and we ascended the far side to our camp in a heavy persistent rain. The whole country was full of crying waters, and but for the clumps of wild bananas and the indescribable African smell, we might have been climbing to a Norwegian saeter after a long day’s fishing.

All night it rained in torrents, and next morning—New Year’s Day—dawned in the same driving misty weather. We could not see twenty yards, and the long sloppy grass and thick red mud of the roads made bad going even for Afrikander ponies. We sent our heavy transport back, and, carrying little more than a dry shirt and a toothbrush, struck down a track which follows the eastern ridge of the valley. The vegetation was as dense as any jungle, and swishing through the reeds and ducking the low branches of trees soaked us to the skin in a few minutes. But in spite of discomfort it was a fascinating ride. The heavy tropical scents which the rain brought out of the ground, the intense silence of the drooping mists and water-laden forests, the clusters of beehive Kaffir huts in the hollows, all made up a world strange and new to the sight and yet familiar to the imagination. This was the old Africa of a boy’s dream, and there is no keener delight than to realise an impression of childhood. Yet, though the air blew sharp, there was something unwholesome in it. Fever lurked in the comely glens, and the clear reaches of the Letaba were not the honest, if scanty, waters of the high veld. The pungent penetrating smell of the herbs we trod underfoot had an uncanniness in it as if all were simples and antidotes—a faint medicinal flavour like the ante-chamber of a physician.

Krabbefontein, which we reached at mid-day, is a very beautiful clearing in the woods on the left bank of the river and at the foot of the Machubi glen. Mr Altenroxel, the owner, farms on a large scale, and has long been famous for his tropical produce. The luxuriance of the growth is so great as almost to pass belief. Gum-trees grow from 10 to 15 feet in a year; and we saw a bamboo fully 50 feet high whose age was under two years. Huge drying-sheds for tobacco, numerous well-built outhouses and cottages, wholly the work of natives, and a few rondhavels made up the farm-steading. The time was past for apricots, but the orchard was full of grenadillas, finest of South African fruit, and kei apples; grapes were plentiful; and in a field of pines we destroyed the remnants of our digestion. The owner remained on his farm throughout the war, growing his own supplies, which included tea, sugar, and coffee. His tobacco is the finest brand of Transvaal pipe-tobacco I have smoked, and he exports to the towns boxes of light-flavoured but pleasant cigars, making everything on the farm except the labels. I have rarely seen native workers so intelligent and industrious, and the whole place leaves an impression of strenuous and enlightened toil. In the bungalow we ate our New Year’s dinner, washed down by excellent German beer, carried many miles across the hills. If the conversation at table approached the domain of fact at all, the neighbourhood is full of uncanny things. A disgusting variety of tarantula, whose bite means death in half an hour, has his home around the tobacco-sheds; puff-adders abound; and the week before our visit a black mamba had attacked and killed a young Dutch girl. We heard, too, many tales of the eastern hunting-veld, and in the huge dark spaces beyond the rafters we saw the shadowy trophies of former hunting trips.

At daybreak next morning, in a thick drizzle, we started to reascend the mountains. A Kaffir set us on our way, and soon the hills closed in and we were in the long glen of Machubi. Machubi was a Kaffir chief with whom the Boers waged one of their many and most inglorious little wars. When his people were scattered he took refuge in the thick forest at the head of the river which bears his name. After my experience of that kind of forest I do not wonder that the Boers preferred not to fight a hand-to-hand battle in its tangled depths. So, after their fashion, they hired an impi of Swazis, who sat around the wood for three weeks, and ultimately slew the chief—not, however, before he had accounted in single-handed combat for three of his enemies. Mr Altenroxel possesses the old warrior’s skull, which, except for the great thickness at the crown of the head, is finely shaped, and all but Caucasian in its lines. For this glen of Machubi I have nothing but praise: high bush-clad mountains, grey corries, streaked with white waterfalls, a limpid hill-stream, and in the flats green patches of Kaffir tillage. But the road—which once was a coach-road!—is pure farce. If there is a peculiarly tangled piece of scrub it dives into it, a really awkward rock and it ascends it, an unfordable reach of an easy stream and it makes straight for it, a swamp and it leads you into the deepest and direst part. We had constantly to dismount and coax our ponies down and up impossible steeps. My little African stallion as a rock-climber was not at his best, and I had some awkward positions to get him out of. One in particular remains in my memory. A very deep river could only be crossed by standing on a stone, leaping to an old log, and thence with a final sprawl to the farther bank. I turned my reins into a halter, went in front, and tried to coax my pony. When at last he did it he all but landed on my chest, and I made the acquaintance of the hardness of every one of his bones before I got him out of the valley.

The road climbs a spur in the fork of two streams, and as one ascends and looks up the narrow twin glens, the old exquisite green of the true Wood Bush takes the place of the sadder colours of the lowlands. The heads of the glens have the form of what are called in the north of England and Scotland “hopes,” rounded green cup-shaped hollows; only here all things are on a larger scale, and the evergreen forest takes the place of birch and juniper in the corries. The road wound through wood and bracken, now coming out clear on a knoll, and now sinking to the level of some little stream. The mist which had covered the mountains was clearing, and one after another the green summits came forth like jewels against the pale morning sky. The tropical scents ceased, the sun shone out, and suddenly we were on the neck of the pass with a meadow-land country falling away from our feet. It was still hazy, but as we breakfasted the foreground slowly cleared. Little white roads sped away over the shoulders of hill; a rushing stream appeared in a hollow with one noble waterfall. Still the landscape opened; wood after wood came into being, glistening like emeralds in the dawn; long sweeps of pasture, each with its glimpse of water, carried the eye to where the great Drakensberg, blue and distant, was emerging from the fleecy mists of morning. Once more we were in the enchanted garden-land.

It is easy to describe the awesome and the immense, but it is hard indeed to convey an adequate impression of exceeding charm and richness. Hard, at least, in dull prose. A line of gleaming poetry, such as Herrick’s—

or Theocritus’s—

will convey more of the true and intimate charm than folios of elaborated description. The main feature of the place is its sharp distinction from the common South African landscape. The high veld with its vast spaces, the noble mountain ravines, the flats of the bush veld, have all their own charm; but the traveller is plagued with the something unfriendly and austere in their air, as if all thought of human life had been wanting in their creation. They are built on a scale other than ours; man’s labour has in the last resort no power to change them. They remain rough, unfinished, eternally strange, a country to admire, but scarcely to adopt and understand. But this garden-ground is wholly human. Natura Benigna was the goddess who presided at its creation, and no roughness enters into the “warm, green-muffled” slopes, the moist temperate weather, and the limpid waters. It is England, richer, softer, kindlier, a vast demesne laid out as no landscape gardener could ever contrive, waiting for a human life worthy of such an environment. But it is more—it is that most fascinating of all types of scenery, a garden on the edge of a wilderness. And such a wilderness! Over the brink of the meadow, four thousand feet down, stretch the steaming fever flats. From a cool fresh lawn you look clear over a hundred miles of nameless savagery. The first contrast which fascinates the traveller is between the common veld and this garden; but the deeper contrast, which is a perpetual delight to the dweller, is between his temperate home and the rude wilds beyond his park wall.

What is to be the fate of it? There is no reason why it should not become at once a closely settled farming country. If the Pietersburg line is looped round between Magatoland and the Spelonken and brought south to meet a line from Leydsdorp, this intervening plateau will have a ready access to markets. The place, too, may become a famous sanatorium, to which the worried town-dwellers may retire to recover health from the quiet greenery. Country houses may spring up, and what is now the preserve of a few enthusiasts may become in time the Simla or Saratoga of the Transvaal. How much, I wonder, will the new-comers see of its manifold graces? Any one can appreciate the mellow air, the restful water-meadows, the profound stillness of the deep-bosomed hills. These are physical matters, making a direct appeal to the simpler senses. But for the rest? It is the place for youth, youth with high spirit and wide horizon, sensitive to scenery and weather, loving wild nature and adventure for their own noble sakes. How much, I wonder, will they see of it all—the people who have the purse to compass health resorts and the constitutions to need them? For here, as in all places of subtle and profound beauty, there is need of the seeing eye and the understanding heart.

I do not think that the place will ever become staled. The special correspondent will not rhapsodise over it—he will find many places better worthy of his genius; the voice of the halfpenny paper will not, I think, be heard in that land. Its appeal is at once too obvious and too subtle: too obvious in its main features to please the common connoisseur, too subtle and remote for the wayfaring man to penetrate. It will remain, I trust, the paradise of a few—a paradise none the less their own because towns and hotels and country houses may have sprung up throughout it. To such it will always appear (as it appeared to us when we took farewell of it from the summit above Haenertsburg and saw the hills and glades sleeping in the mellow afternoon) an old-world Arcadia, a lost classic land which Nature with her artist’s humour has created in this raw unstoried Africa.

December 1902-January 1903.

---

CHAPTER IX.

ON THE EASTERN VELD.

Machadodorp, that straggling village called after a Portuguese commander, is the most easterly outpost of the high veld. A few miles farther and there is a sheer fall into narrow mountain glens, down which the Elands River and the Delagoa Bay Railway make the best of their way to the lowlands. North lies the hill country of Lydenburg, to which the traveller may come in a coach after a day of heart-breaking hills and neck-breaking descents. But south for a good hundred miles sweeps the high veld in a broad promontory from Machadodorp to the Pongola, and on the east to the Swaziland border. It is the highest part of the great central tableland, and a very bleak dwelling-place in winter; but in summer and autumn it has a full share of the curious veld beauty. In particular, being in the line of the Drakensberg, you can come to its edge and look over into the wild tangle of glens which lie between you and the Lebombo hills. Also it is the lake district of South Africa, being full of tarns of all sizes from Lake Chrissie, which is a respectable sheet of water, to the tiniest reed-filled pan. It is the coldest, freshest, and windiest part of the land, a tonic country where the inhabitants are rarely ill, and few doctors can make a living. The journey to the first outspan from Machadodorp on the Ermelo road is a little monotonous, for you are not yet on the ridge of the high veld, the grass is rank, and the landscape featureless. You are pursued, too, by an unfinished railway, the Machadodorp-Carolina line, and if there is an uglier thing than the raw scar made by earthworks and excavations and uncompleted culverts, I do not know it. The line is being taken over by Government, and the sooner it is laid the better, for at present the richest farming population in the Transvaal are some sixty miles from a rail-head. At the fine stone bridge of the Komati you enter a more pleasing country, with a glimpse to the east of a gap in the hills through which the river enters the broken country. The Komati here is a slow high-veld stream creeping through long muddy pools with the slenderest of currents, but some eight miles down it is a hill torrent. This is one of the paradoxes of the high-veld rivers. Elsewhere it is in their cradle that streams have their “bright speed”; here the infant river must be content to creep like a canal, and lo! when it is almost full grown, it finds itself hurled in cataracts down a mountain valley. Who, seeing the Olifants near Middelburg, can ever believe that it is the same stream which swirls round a corner of the berg north of Ohrigstad; or, watching the sluggish Umpilusi crawling through the high veld, find any kinship between it and the Swaziland salmon-river? It is a romantic career—first a chain of half-stagnant pools, then a cataract, and then a full-grown river, rolling its yellow waters through leagues of bush and jungle to the tropical ocean.

From Everard’s store, which is a pleasant outspan among trees, the road climbs steeply to the ridge of the country. A tremendous sweep of veld comes into view, stretching to the west in hazy leagues till the eyes dazzle with the soft contours and infinite lines, and in the east barred at a great distance by a faint blue range, the Ingwenya Mountains. The first pan appeared, no larger than an English mill-dam, and overgrown with reeds which made a patch of darker green against the veld. One had the sensation of being somewhere on the roof of the world, for on every horizon but one the land sloped to a lower altitude, and even on the east the mountains seemed foreshortened, like the masts of a vessel just coming into sight at sea. Presently a little white dorp, Carolina, appeared some miles away on the left, with that curious look of a Pilgrim’s Progress village which so many veld townships possess. Then miles on miles of the same green downland, the road now sinking into little valleys with a glimpse of farm-steadings, and now holding the ridge in the centre of the amphitheatre. As the autumn evening fell, and the soft lights bathed the landscape, it became a spectral world, a Tir-an-Oig, in which it was difficult to believe that this rose-coloured slope was not a dream or that purple clump of trees a mirage. Little lochs appeared, some olive-green with rushes, some cold and black with inky waves lapping on dazzling white shores. Water, in Novalis’ quaint fancy, is as the eye to a landscape, the one thing generally lacking in the blind infinity of the veld. Strings of wild-geese passed over our heads, and from the meadow bottoms there came the call of ducks and now and then the bark of a korhaan. Curious echoes arose as we passed, for there is something in the geological structure of the country which makes it full of eerie noises. And then, as darkness closed down, a long piece of water appeared, beyond which rose a little hill with two woods of blue gum and a light between them. A nearer view showed a trim cottage, with Kaffir huts around it, the beginnings of a garden, and, even in the dusk, a glimpse of long lines of crops stretching down to the lake. It was the homestead of Florence, which stands on the apex of a large block of Crown land, and is used as the headquarters of the land commissioner of the eastern district.

From Florence to the Swaziland border is some fifty miles as the crow flies, so at dawn our horses were saddled, and, with a mule-cart for provisions, we set out towards the remote hills. The morning had begun in a Scots mist, but by ten o’clock the sky was cloudless, and the intense blue of the lakes, the white shores, and the many patches of marl on the slopes caught the sun with a bewildering glare. The water in the pans is generally brackish, but some few are fresh, and one in particular, about four miles long, has wooded islets and a bold white bluff like a chalk cliff. The names are mostly Scots—Blairmore, Ardentinny, Hamilton,—for the land was first bought and settled by a Glasgow company. They are almost all stock farms, with little irrigation except along the Umpilusi; and many are fenced, efficiently enough, with slabs of stone for uprights. On one farm, Lake Banagher, we rode past a herd of some 300 or 400 blesbok and springbok, which are preserved by Mr Schalk Meyer, the owner. About noon we came into the shallow vale of the Umpilusi, and left it again for a high ridge, whence all afternoon we had a view of rolling country to the south, with the Slaangaapies mountains on the horizon. The great hills in the north of Swaziland were faint but clear, though we were still too high ourselves to see them to advantage. The country began to change, the valleys became almost glens, a great deal of tumbled rock appeared overgrown with bush and bracken, and everything spoke of the beginnings of a mountain country, which, strangely enough, we were approaching from above. In the late afternoon we came to large belts of trees around a ruined farmhouse, and as the sky was beginning to threaten we outspanned for the night. We were not more than half a dozen miles from the Swazi border and in full sight of it—a chain of little kopjes with a hint of faint mountains behind.

The farmhouse was an odd place seen in that stormy dusk. Thick woods of blue-gum and pine surrounded it, and below, also hemmed in by trees, was a lush water-meadow. The house had been a substantial stone building, but it was stripped to the walls, every scrap of woodwork having been used by the troops for fuel. The broken stoep was overgrown with moon-flowers, whose huge white blossoms gleamed uncannily in the shadows. We pushed through the wood and the overgrown paddock to a neglected orchard, where the fruit-trees had lost all semblance of their former selves, and struggled vainly among creepers and high grasses, and thence to the meadow where a little reddish stream trickled through the undergrowth. Owls flitted about like the ghosts of the place, and this relic of war with its moated-grange melancholy had a depressing effect on our spirits. We gladly sought our camp in an old barn on higher ground, where a blazing fire restored us to cheerfulness. The rain never fell, and the morning dawned grey and misty, so that when we set out for the border we had little hope of a view. We passed some Swazi kraals, and got directions from their picturesque occupants. The men are active and tall, and their wives with their curious head-dresses are better to look at than the sluttish native women of the central districts. They are beautiful dancers, and the performance of a body of Swazis in war costume is a thing to remember. The country began to be extremely rocky, and tree-ferns and other specimens of sub-tropical vegetation appeared in the hollows. One glossy-leaved bush bore a berry about the size and shape of a rasp, called by the natives “infanfaan,” which had an agreeable sub-acid flavour. A little hill, looking as if it were made of one single gigantic boulder, appeared on the right, and with some scrambling we got our horses to the foot of it. This was Bell’s Kop, a famous landmark, and beyond and below was Swaziland.

The morning had cleared, and though the horizons were misty, we saw enough to reward us. The ground fell sharply away from our feet to a green glen studded with trees, down which a white road wound. A hill shut the glen, but over the hill and at a much lower altitude we saw the strath of the Umpilusi, with the river running in wide sweeps with shores of gravel, not unlike the Upper Spey as seen from the Grampians. Beyond were tiers of broken blue hills, rising very high towards the north, where they culminate in Piggs’ Peak, but fading southward into a misty land where lay the Lebombo flats. The grey soft air had an intense stillness, a kind of mountain melancholy, but far to the south there was a patch of sunlight on the green hills above Amsterdam. It is a type of view which can be had in all parts of the Drakensberg, from Mont aux Sources frowning over Natal to the Spelonken looking down on the plains of the Letaba—a view to me of infinite charm, for you stand upon the dividing line between two forms of country and two climates, looking back upon the endless prairies and their fresh winds and forward upon warm glens and the remote malarial tropics.

From Bell’s Kop we fetched a wide circuit, going to Amsterdam, which was not more than fifteen miles from where we stood, by Florence and Ermelo, a journey of over 100 miles. The afternoon ride was something to remember, for the day had cleared into a bright afternoon with cool winds blowing, and the green ridges had a delicate pastoral beauty, as of sunlit sheep-walks. When we forded the Umpilusi its sluggish pools were glowing with the fires of sunset. Cantering in the hazy twilight of the long slopes was pure romance, and the sounds from a Kaffir kraal, the slow mild-eyed oxen on the road, and the wheeling of wild birds had all the strangeness of things seen and heard in a dream. I know no such tonic for the spirits, for in such a scene and at such a time the blood seems to run more freely in the veins, the mind to be purged from anxious indolence, and the whole nature to become joyous and receptive. Much comes from the air. There is something in those spaces of clear absolute ether, eternally wide, fresh as spring water, pure as winds among snow, which not only sustains but vitalises and rejuvenates the body. There is something, too, in the life. Fine scenery is too often witnessed by men when living the common life of civilisation and enjoying the blessings of a good cook and a not indifferent cellar. But on the veld there is bare living and hard riding, so that a man becomes thin and hard and very much alive, the dross of ease is purged away, and body and mind regain the keen temper which is their birthright.

We outspanned at a Boer farm and dined with the family off home-made bread, confyt, and tea. They were very hospitable and friendly, and discussed the war and current politics with all freedom. The walls were adorned with numerous portraits of British generals; and the farmer, who had been in Bermuda, displayed with much pride the carvings with which he had beguiled his captivity. One of the sons read assiduously a Dutch translation of one of Mayne Reid’s novels, and when he could tear himself from the narrative contributed to the talk some details of his commando-life under Ben Viljoen, for whom, in common with most of the younger Dutch, he had a profound admiration. These people are a strange mixture—so hospitable, that the traveller is ashamed to go near a Boer farm, seeing the straitness of their lives and the generosity with which they give what they have; and yet so squalid that they make little effort to better their condition. This particular farmer owned four large farms, worth in the present market not less than £20,000; the sale of one or a part of one would have given him ample means to buy stock and start again. But he was content to go on as he was, running up a long bill with the Repatriation depot, and grumbling at the high prices for stock compared with what he had been used to pay. The result was that, though he had been back for nine months, I saw no living thing on that farm but a few chickens, six goats, and a spavined horse.

We made the last stage to Florence shortly after sunrise, and arrived at the homestead in time for breakfast. The twenty odd miles to Ermelo were the easy journey of an afternoon. We passed the ruined township of Chrissie, with a roofless kirk and some flourishing plantations of firs. The lake itself lay over some meadows, a pear-shaped piece of water, very shallow, and at its greatest perhaps some six or eight miles round. Yet in spite of its shallowness there is ample depth for a small centre-board; and when the railway is completed and Chrissie becomes a summer sanatorium, there is no reason why a modest kind of yachting should not be enjoyed. For the rest it is a bare road, with outcrops of coal appearing here and there, and the infant Vaal to be crossed, a very mean and muddy little stream. You come on Ermelo with surprise, dipping over the brow of a barren ridge and seeing a cheerful little town beneath you. It suffered heavily in the war, being literally levelled with the ground, but when we passed most of the houses had been cobbled together and new buildings were arising. It lies in a rich mineral tract, and is also the centre of a wide pastoral district, so with improved communications it may very well become a thriving country town. Whoever laid it out showed good judgment in the planting of trees; and in that bare land it is pleasant to come on such a village in a wood. My chief recollection of Ermelo is of a talk with a deputation of neighbouring farmers on the subject of cattle diseases. One admirable old man explained his perplexity. “Formerly,” he said, “we used to be told that all diseases came from on High. Now we are told that some are from on High and some are our own fault. But which is which? Personally,” he concluded, “I believe that Providence is a good deal to blame for them all.”

About noon the following day we set out for Amsterdam. The first part of the road is monotonous, for it follows a straight line of blockhouses in a bleak featureless country. We crossed the inevitable Vaal again, a little larger and perhaps a little dirtier, but not appreciably more attractive. Sometimes we came to a flat moor like Rannoch with faint blue mountains beyond it, but the common type was a succession of ridges without a shade of difference between them. The weather had broken, and dust-coloured showers pursued us over the face of the heavens, till, as we came in sight of the considerable hill of Bankkop, the whole sky behind us had darkened for a wet evening. As we came down from the height, where the colour of the roads told of coal, and entered a green marshy valley, the storm burst on us,—a true African rain which drenches a man in two minutes. We sought shelter in a farmhouse, or rather in a blockhouse in the stackyard, for there was little left of the house except a shanty which the owner had restored for his present accommodation. All evening it rained in solid sheets, and to dinner, a meal cooked under difficulties, the Boer farmer came and talked to us, sitting on a barrel and telling stories of the war. He had the ordinary tale—against the war at the start, compelled to fight, had remonstrated with Louis Botha on his conduct of the Natal campaign, and, grumbling greatly, had followed his leader till he was caught and sent to Ceylon. The Boer discipline must have been a curious growth, and, when we realise the intense individualism of the fighting men, we begin to see the greatness of the achievement of Botha and Delarey in keeping them together at all. Our friend was living in squalid penury, but he was drawing enough in mineral options on his farm to have restocked it and lived in comfort, if he had pleased. There is no doubt in my mind, after such experiences, as to what would have been the wisest and kindest form of repatriation for landowners, had we had the courage to adopt it,—compulsory sale of a portion of the farm, and out of the capital thus supplied the farmer could have bought what he wanted at reasonable prices from Government depots. Such a method would have given the Government more good land, which it urgently wants; it would have saved the endless credit accounts which in the long-run will give trouble both to Boer and Government; and it would have saved the pauperisation into which the Boer is only too ready to sink. There would, of course, have been many exceptions in the case of the very poor and landless classes, but for the landholder it would have been not only the most politic but in his eyes the most intelligible plan.

I shall never forget the night spent in that blockhouse. Every known form of vermin—fleas, bugs, mosquitoes, spiders, rats, and, for all I know, snakes—came out of the holes where they had fasted for months and attacked us. I lay for hours swathed in a kaross, my face tingling, watching through the open square of door a melancholy moon trying to show herself among the rain-clouds, and wishing I had had the wisdom to sleep on the wet veld rather than in that chamber of horrors. Sheer bodily weariness induced a few uneasy hours of sleep, but the first ray of dawn found me thankfully arising. We breakfasted in haste, inspanned hurriedly, and were on the road an hour after sunrise. A long ascent brought us to the ridge of those hills of which Bankkop and Spitzkop are part, an extension of the Drakensberg from Wakkerstroom across the veld to the Swazi border. Then we passed over some very flat meadows to another ridge, from which we had a clear view of the Slaangaapies mountains to the south, and before us to the north-east the long green range of hills above Amsterdam. It was a curious picture for the Transvaal, a line of hills with regular glens and soft contours unbroken by rock or tree, and at the foot in a wood a few white cottages—a reminiscence of Galloway or Tweeddale; and one can well understand how the Scots settlers, who founded the place and gave it its first name of Robburnia after their national poet, saw in the landscape a picture of their home. We skirted the village on the left, and found the farm where we were to outspan. Here heroic measures were taken to get rid of the results of the blockhouse. A large tub was filled with hot water, and a bottle of sheep-dip was emptied into it. In this mixture we wallowed, and emerged from it scarified but clean.

The farm was the property of a Scots gentleman, who in six months had made new water-furrows, built himself a comfortable house, put over 200 acres under crops, and was running a fair head of stock on the hills. In the afternoon we rode with him to Mr Forbes’ farm of Athole, some three miles off, which is perhaps the largest private landed estate in one piece in the country. It runs to some 60,000 acres, a huge square tract between two streams, from which is obtained a fine prospect of the Swaziland hills. Mr Forbes, who owns much land across the border, is one of the two or three living Englishmen who know the Swazis best, having for fifty years or more traded, farmed, and mined in their country. Before the war Athole was a great game-preserve, with 3000 blesbok, 2000 springbok, as well as reed-buck, impala, the two rheboks, and a few klipspringer. Now some odd springbok along the stream are almost all that remain. But when Mr Forbes first came to the place eland, koodoo, and hartebeest were the common game, and one could kill a lion on most farms. Of the original Scots settlers, who gave the name of New Scotland to the district, a few still remain, and their farms can be told far off by the neat strips of plantation which make the place like a hillside in Ayrshire. The land was acquired very cheaply from the Government,—one farm, if tales be true, going for a pair of boots, and another for a keg of whisky. The Boers themselves bought the whole tract from the Swazi border to Ermelo, and from the Komati in the north to the Pongola in the south—perhaps 3000 square miles—from the Swazi king for 150 oxen and 50 blankets. As at that time an ox was worth about 30s., it was not a high price, and the Boers still further improved the bargain by declining to pay the blankets. When Mr Forbes came to the place he was visited by a deputation of Swazi chiefs to discuss the subject, and to save trouble gave them the blankets from his own stores.

In Amsterdam next morning I was taken for a prospector, and played the part for a considerable time, to the confusion of an ex-official of the place, who wished to profit by my knowledge, but could make neither head nor tail of my answers. It is a sleepy little town, with not more than half a dozen houses lying pleasantly in gardens, with mountain streams on all sides and pastoral green hills to the east and north. South, where lay our road, are swelling moorlands, flanked by the Slaangaapies and the Swazi hills, and crossed at frequent intervals by clear grey streams. The first of these is the Compies, a few miles from the village, and a more naturally perfect trout-stream I have rarely seen. There were deep blue pools, and long shallow stretches, and little rapids in whose tail one should have been able to get a salmon. When trout become thoroughly acclimatised in the Transvaal, and the proper waters are stocked, he will be a happy man who owns a mile or two of the Compies. As if to intensify the atmosphere of fishing, it began to rain heavily and a cold mist blew up from the south. The long grass became hoar with rain-drops, and the innumerable veld watercourses found their voices after months of dry silence. Still more lipping grey streams, and then the rain ceased as suddenly as it had come, and in a deceptive gleam of sunlight we came into Piet Retief. It is a long, straggling, dingy village lying on two ridges. The mountains on all sides are too far off to be a feature in one’s view of it, and save that it is one of the backdoors to Swaziland, there is little of interest for the traveller. At the entrance you pass a monument to Piet Retief, of which only the pedestal is completed—a poor tribute to a great man.

After lunch the rain began again in real earnest, and there was nothing for it but to loiter through the afternoon in waterproofs and hope for a dry morrow. It is not the most cheerful of places, but seen through the pauses of the driving wrack it had a wild charm of its own. In particular the Slaangaapies mountains, a dozen miles off, when by any chance they were visible for a moment, stood out black and threatening, with white cataracts seaming their sides and murky shadows in their glens. The Dutch name means “Snake-monkeys,” but the natives call them beautifully “The Mother of Rains.” The inhabitants of the district are almost the lowest type in the Transvaal,—poor, disreputable, half-bred, despised by their neighbours and neglected by the late Government. The progressive element in the district is represented by a German colony, who were originally placed there by the wily Boer as a buffer against the natives, but who throve and multiplied and now own the best farms in the district. The most interesting thing I saw in the place was a large Boer hound, with the hair on the ridge of his back growing in an opposite direction to the rest of his coat. Now this type is rare, and, when found, makes the finest hunting dog in the world, for he will tackle a charging lion, and, indeed, fears nothing created. I had often been advised if I came across such a dog to buy him at any price, but in this case his Dutch owner utterly refused to sell, and I had to depart in envious gloom.

Before daybreak next morning, in a mist which clothed the world like a garment, so that we walked in fleecy vapour, we set off on the sixty miles’ journey to Wakkerstroom. The first half is through an exceedingly dreary land. We crossed the Assegai, a finely named but inglorious stream, chiefly remarkable for its rapid flooding, and then for a score of miles we ascended and descended little sandy hills, and saw on each side of the road as far as the edge of the mist the same endless coarse herbage. In fine weather there is the wall of Slaangaapies to give dignity to the landscape; but for us there was only a bank of cloud. Before our mid-day outspan the sky cleared a little, and huge stony blue hills appeared on our left, with bush straggling up their sides and stray sun-gleams on their bald summits. We outspanned for lunch at Vanderpoel’s store, which is a couple of huts in a perfectly flat dusty plain with a fine ring of hazy mountains around it. The day became exceedingly hot, still cloudy, but with a dazzle behind the mists which it hurt the eye to look at,—the kind of weather which makes the cheeks flame and tires the traveller far more readily than a clear sun and a blue sky. Again the same hills and dales, but now with a gradually increasing elevation, till when we came to a fine stream falling over a precipice into a meadow and looked back, we saw the Slaangaapies as if from a neighbour hill-top. A curious little peak appeared on the right, with what the Dutch call a castrol or saucepan on its head, a perfectly round ring of kranzes which presented the appearance of an extinguisher dropped down suddenly on the summit. It is a common sight in this part of the Berg, where the great original chain of cliffs has been broken and hills lie tumbled about like the dÉbris of greater mountains.

At Joubert’s Hoogte the road emerges from the glens, and the south opens up into a mazy tangle of hills. It is one of the noblest views in the country; but for us the mist curtailed the perspective, while it greatly increased the mystery. Shapes of mountains floating through a haze have far more fascination for the lover of highlands than a long prospect to a clearly defined horizon. Below lay the broad woody valley of the Upper Pongola, shut off in the east by the spurs of the Slaangaapies. The far mist was flecked with little sun-gleams, which showed now an emerald slope, now the grey and black of a cliff, and now a white flash of water. The air had the intense stillness of grey weather and great height; only the neighing of our horses broke in upon what might have been the first chaos out of which the world emerged. Thence for a few miles we kept on the ridge till we dipped into the hollow of a stream and slowly climbed a long pass where the road clung to the edges of precipitous slopes and wriggled among great rocks. The mist closed down, and but for the feeling in the air which spoke of wider spaces, we could not have told that we had reached the top of Castrol’s Nek, the gate of the South-Eastern Transvaal. A Constabulary notice plastered on a weather-worn board was another sign that the place was a known landmark. As soon as we passed the summit the country grew softer. The shoulders of hills seemed greener, and along the little watercourses bracken and a richer vegetation appeared. The evening was falling, and as we slipped down the winding road the white mist faded into deeper and deeper grey, till at last we emerged from it and saw a clear sky above us and hills standing out black and rain-washed against the yellows of sunset. By-and-by in the centre of the amphitheatre of mountains a dozen lights twinkled out, and in a little we were off-saddling very weary horses in the pleasant town of Wakkerstroom.

March-April 1903.

---

CHAPTER X.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD.

The romance which is inseparable from all roads belongs especially to those great arteries of the world which traverse countries and continents, and unite different zones and climates, and pass through extreme variations of humankind. For in them the adventurous sense of the unknown, which is found in a country lane among hedgerows, becomes an ever-present reality to the most casual traveller. And it is a peculiarity of the world’s roads that this breath of romance blows most strongly on the paths which point to the Pole-star. The Æmilian Way, up which the Roman legions clanked to the battlefields of Gaul and Britain, or that great track which leads through India to the mountains of the north and thence to the steppes of Turkestan, captures the fancy more completely than any lateral traverse of the globe. A way which passes direct through the widest extremes of weather, and is in turn frozen and scorched or blown in sand, has an air of purpose which is foreign to long tracks in the same latitude, and carries a more direct impress of the shaping and audacious spirit of man. Of all north roads I suppose the greatest to be that which runs from the Cape to Egypt, greatest both for its political meaning, the strangeness of the countries to which it penetrates, the difficulties and terrors of the journey, and, above all, for the fact that it is a traverse of the extreme length of a vast and mysterious continent. It has been associated in the south with the schemes of a great dreamer, and in the north with the practical work of a great soldier and a great administrator. Between these two beginnings we all but lose trace of it in wilds of sand and swamp, the dense forests, the lakes and the wild mountains of Equatorial Africa, penetrated at rare intervals by native paths and old hunters’ tracks. But to the eye of faith the road is there, marching on with single purpose from one railway head on the veld to another in the Soudanese desert. The men who travel it are hunters and prospectors, a few soldiers, a chance official, and once and again an explorer: but they travel only short stages, and there are few indeed who, like my friend Mr E. S. Grogan, carry their staff and scrip from end to end of it. To the amateur, like the present writer, who goes a little way on it, the thought of this majestic Way gives dignity to the ill-defined sandy track in which he may be floundering, and makes each northern horizon seem like the hill-tops of the Apennines, somewhere behind which, as the pilgrim is confident, lie the towers and pinnacles of Rome. I would recommend as a panacea for cold and comfortless nights on the road that the mind of the traveller should occupy itself with a projected itinerary. He will see the Road running as a hunter’s path from the Limpopo to the Zambesi—through thorn scrub and park-land and stony mountain. Then he will travel up the ShirÉ by Nyassaland and on by Tanganyika to Ruwenzori and the lakes; and if he is not asleep by the time he has seen the sun rise on Albert Nyanza and fought his way through the Dinkas and the mosquitoes of the Nile swamps, then he must be an unquiet man with an evil conscience.

Only a little section of the road runs through the Transvaal. The practical road has indeed been diverted at De Aar in Cape Colony, and in the shape of a railway runs to Rhodesia and the neighbourhood of the Victoria Falls. But to the pilgrim this is a palpable subterfuge, for the straight highway goes through the Transvaal, taking the form of a railway as far as Pietersburg, and then becoming the Bulawayo coach-road for some eighty miles, till it plunges sheer into the bush as a hunter’s road and makes for Main Drift on the Limpopo. It is a type of the vicissitudes which the Great Road is made to suffer,—railway, admitted highroad, hunter’s path, native track, no road, and then a chain of waterways till it becomes a river, and meets the railway again after 3000 miles of obscurity. With a profound respect for the road, I am constrained to admit that it makes bad going, that it is insufficiently provided with water, that there are no signposts or inns or, for the matter of that, white habitations, that lions do the survey work and wild pigs the engineering, and that it is apt to cease suddenly and leave the traveller to his own devices. But for the eye of Faith, that wonderful possession of raw youth and wise old age, it is as broad and solid as the Appian Way; the wheels of empire and commerce pass over it, and cities, fairer than a mirage, seem to rise along its shadowy course.

Our starting-point was the Repatriation depot at Pietersburg, a large white-walled enclosure, with row upon row of stables and sheds and in the centre a cluster of thatched white dwelling-houses. It has the air of an Eastern caravanserai, for convoys come in and go out all day long, and the news of the Road is brought there by every manner of traveller. Apart from Government work with its endless trains of ox and mule waggons, it is the starting-place for all sorts of prospecting and hunting parties, and farmers from seventy miles round ride in for stock or supplies. If a lion is killed or gold found or a man lost anywhere in the north, word will be brought in to the depot by some Dutch conductor, so that the place is far better supplied with news of true interest than your town with its dozen newspapers. For the essence of news is that it should be vital to one’s daily interests, and tidings of a massacre in China is less stimulating to the mind than word of a neighbour’s windfall or disaster. I can conceive no more fascinating life than to dwell comfortably on the edge of a savage country from which in the way of one’s business all news comes first to one’s ears. To control transport is to be the tutelary genius of travel, and in a sense the life of the wilds takes its origin from the little caravanserai which sends forth and welcomes the traveller.

The high veld continues for some thirty miles north of the town before it sinks into bush and a humbler elevation. It is ordinary high veld—bleak, dusty, and in August a sombre grey; but on the east the blue lines, which are the Wood Bush and the Spelonken mountains, and in the far west the thin hills about the Magalakween valley, remind the traveller how near he is to the edge of the central plateau. Ten miles out a crest was reached, and we looked down on a long slope, with high mountains making gates in the distance, and a sharp little hill called Spitzkop set in the foreground. It was a cool hazy day, and in the west the kopjes seemed to swim in an illimitable sea of blue. The land is all part of Malietsie’s location, and patches of tillage and an occasional cluster of huts gave it a habitable air. The native girls wear thick rings of brass round their necks, which gives them a straight figure and a high carriage of the head, pleasant to see in a place where people slouch habitually. Malietsie’s is one of those Basuto tribes which are scattered over the North Transvaal—not the best type of native, for they are credulous and idle in their raw state, and when Christianised and dwelling near mission-stations, incorrigibly lazy and deceitful. They are also inordinately superstitious. I found that no one of my boys, who were mostly from Malietsie’s, would stir ten yards beyond the camp after dark. At first I thought the reason was dread of wild beasts, but I discovered afterwards that it was fear of spooks, particularly of one spook who rolled along the road in the shape of a ball of fire. It is a tribute to the greatness of the North Road that it should have a respectable ghost of its own. In a little we passed the last store, kept by an old Scotsman, who gave us much information about the district. He talked of the Road, the River, and the Mountain, without further designation, which is a pleasing habit of country folk, who give the generic name to the instances which dominate their daily life. The Limpopo was the River, the Zoutpansberg the Mountain, because no other river or mountain had a local importance comparable with these, just as to a Highland gillie his own particular ben is “the hill,” just as to Egypt the Nile is not the Nile but “the River.” He measured distance, too, by the Road: this place was so many miles down the road, that water-hole so many days’ journey up. We inspanned again in the evening, and in a little turned the flanks of Spitzkop, and coming over a little rise saw a wide plain before us densely covered with dwarf trees. The long line of the Zoutpansberg comes to an abrupt end in a cliff above the Zoutpan. On the west the huge mass of the Blaauwberg also breaks off sharply in tiers of fine precipices. Between the two is a level, from fifteen to twenty miles wide, which is the pass from the high veld to the north. It is a broad gate, but the only one, for to the east the Zoutpansberg is impassable for a hundred miles, and on the west beyond the Blaauwberg the Magalakween valley is a long circuit and a difficult country. The great mountain walls were dim with twilight, but there was day enough left to see the immediate environs of the road. They had a comical suggestion of a dilapidated English park. The road was fine gravel, the trees in the half light looked often like gnarled oaks and beeches, and the coarse bush grass seemed like neglected turf. It is a resemblance which dogs one through the bush veld. You are always coming to the House and never arriving. At every turn you expect a lawn, a gleam of water, a grey wall; soon, surely, the edges will be clipped, the sand will cease, the dull green will give place to the tender green of watered grass. But the House remains to be found, though I have a fancy that it may exist on a spur of Ruwenzori. As it was, we had to put up with a tent and a dinner of curried korhaan, and during the better part of a very cold night some jackals performed a strenuous serenade.

The next morning dawned clear and very chilly, the mountains smoking with mist, and the dust behind our waggons rising to heaven in sharply outlined columns. However cold and comfortless the night, however badly the limbs ache from sleeping on hard ground, there is something in the tonic mornings which in an hour or so dispels every feeling but exhilaration. Water-holes have been made for the post-cart at lengthy intervals, but between there is nothing but rank bush, with flat trees like the vegetation in a child’s drawing produced by rubbing the pencil across the paper. Animal life was rich along the road—numerous small buck, a belated jackal or two, the graceful black-and-white birds which country people call “Kaffir queens,” korhaan, guinea-fowl, partridge, quantities of bush crows, and an endless variety of hawk and falcon. We left the Road and made a long detour over sandy tracks to visit the Zoutpan, from which the hills get their name, the most famous of Transvaal salt-pans. It is about three miles in circumference, and consisted at this season of caked grey mud, with little water-trenches and heaps of white salt on their banks. A wise law of the late Government forbade the alienation of salt-pans, but for some unknown reason a concession was given over this one, and instead of being the perquisite in winter of the arme Boeren it is managed by a Pietersburg syndicate, and as far as I could judge managed very well. The work is done by natives from the mountains who live round a little stream which flows from the berg to the pan, and forms the only fresh water for miles. The day became very hot, and the glare from the pan was blinding to unaccustomed eyes. As we returned to the main road, the noble mass of the Blaauwberg was before us, one of the finest and least known of South African mountains. That curious fiasco, the Malapoch war, was fought there, and Malapoch’s people still live in its corries. To a rock-climber it is a fascinating picture, with sheer rock walls streaked with fissures which a glass shows to be chimneys, and I longed to be able to spend a week exploring its precipices. To a mountaineer South Africa offers many attractions, for apart from what may be found in isolated ranges, there are some hundreds of miles of the Drakensberg with thousands of good climbs, and above all the great north-eastern buttress of Mont aux Sources, which to the best of my knowledge has never been conquered.

In the afternoon the country changed, the bush opened out, timber trees took the place of thorn, and long glades appeared of good winter pasture. There was a great abundance of game, and for the first time the paauw appeared, stalking about or slowly flapping across the grass. He is a fine bird to shoot with the rifle, but a hard fellow for a gun, for it is difficult to get within close range; and as a rule at anything over thirty yards he will carry all the shot you care to give him. This park-land lasts for about ten miles, and then at Brak River it ends and a dense thorn scrub begins, which extends almost without interruption to the Limpopo. There we found our relays of mules, and on a dusty patch near the mule-scherm we outspanned for the night. We were nearing the country of big game. A lion had been seen on the Bulawayo road the day before, a little north of the station; and it was a common enough thing to have them reconnoitring the scherm. As soon as darkness fell the cry of wolves began, that curious unearthly wail which is one of the eeriest of veld sounds. Most forcible reminder of all, a hunting party ahead of us had lost a man, who, after wandering for six days in the bush, while his companions gave him up for dead, had come out on the Road and been found by the man in charge of our relays. It was a miracle that he had not lost his reason or perished of thirst and fatigue, for he had neither food nor water with him, and only a little cloth cap to keep off the tropical sun. An old Boer from Louis Trichard, trekking with oxen, camped beside us; and after dining delicately off guinea-fowl I went over to his fire to talk to him. He was a typical back-veld Boer—a great hunter, friendly, without any sort of dignity, a true frontier man, to whom politics mean nothing and his next meal everything. He told me amazing lion stories, in which he always gave the coup de grÂce, and displayed incredible courage and skill. He showed me with pride a ·400 express bullet which he kept wrapt up in paper—whether as a charm or a souvenir I do not know, for his own weapon was an ancient Martini. His one political prejudice concerned the Jews, whose character he outlined to me with great spirit. They were the opposite of everything implied in the term “oprecht”; but I am inclined to believe that, like many of us, he secretly believed that all foreigners were Jews, and in hugging the prejudice showed himself a nationalist at heart.

The coach-road runs due north to Tuli and Bulawayo, but the Road itself takes a slight bend to the east and follows the course of the mythical Brak River. For miles this stream does not exist—there is not even the slightest suggestion of a bed; and then appears a dirty hole full of greenish, brackish water, and we hail the resurrected river. It is necessary for the traveller to know where such holes lie, for they are the only water in the neighbourhood; and though the Road keeps close to them, there is nothing in the dense thorn bush which lines its sides to reveal the presence of water. I have never seen bleaker bush-land. All day long, through hanging clouds of dust, we crept through the featureless country, the Zoutpansberg and Blaauwberg behind us growing hourly fainter. For the information of travellers, I would say that the first water is at a place called Krokodilgat, the second at a place called Rietgaten, and that after that the Road bends northward away from the river, and there is no water till Taqui is reached. The dust of the track was thick with the spoor of wild cats, wolves, the blue wildebeest, and at rare intervals of wild ostrich. As night fell the bush became very dead and silent, save for the far-away howl of a jackal,—a dull olive-green ocean under a wonderful turquoise sky. We encamped after dark in a little wayside hollow, where we built a large fire and a massive scherm or enclosure of thorns for the animals. There was every chance of a lion, so I retired to rest with pleasant anticipations and a quantity of loaded firearms near my head. But no lion came, though about two o’clock in the morning the mules grew very restless, and a majestic figure (which was indeed no other than the present writer’s), armed with a ·400 express, might have been seen clambering about the top of the waggon and straining sleepy eyes into the bush.

We started at dawn next morning, as we had a long journey before water. The thorn bush disappeared and gave place to a more open country, full of a kind of wormwood which gave an aromatic flavour to the fresh morning air. Then came a new kind of bush, the mopani, a wholesome green little shrub, with butterfly-shaped foliage. The leaves of this tree would appear to be for the healing of the nations, for a decoction of them is regarded both as a preventive against and a cure for malaria; and a mopani poultice is a sovereign cure for bruises. Among the spoor on the track was that of a large lion going towards Taqui. There were also to our surprise the spoor and droppings of oxen. When about eleven o’clock we reached the large pits of whitey-blue brackish water which bear that name, we found the reason of both. A shooting party encamped there had had their cattle stampeded in the night, and early in the morning a Dutch hunter who accompanied them had gone out to look for them, and found an ox freshly killed by a lion not a quarter of a mile from the camp. He followed the lion, and wounded him with a long-range shot. When we arrived the search for the lion had begun, and he was found stone-dead a little way on, with his belly distended with ox-flesh and the bullet in his lungs. He was a very large lion, measuring about ten and a-half feet from tip to tip, rather old, and with broken porcupine-quills embedded in his skin. A trap-gun was set, and two nights later a very fine young black-maned lion, about the same size, was found dead a hundred yards from the trap, with a broken shoulder and a bullet in his spine. The remainder of the story shows the Providence which watches over foolish oxen. All were recovered save one, which died of red-water. They went straight back the road they had come; and though the country-side was infested with lions, wolves, and tiger-cats, they reached the mule-scherm at Brak River in safety.

From Taqui the road climbs a chain of kopjes where it is almost overarched with trees, so that a covered waggon has difficulty in getting through. From the summit there is a long prospect of flat bush country running to the Limpopo, with a bold ridge of hills on the Rhodesian side, and far to the east the faint line of mountains which is the continuation of the Zoutpansberg to the Portuguese border. The bush was dotted with huge baobabs, the cream-of-tartar trees which so impressed the voortrekkers in Lydenburg. At this season the branches were leafless, but a good deal of fruit remained, which our native boys eagerly gathered and munched for the rest of the journey. The fruit has a hard shell, and is filled with little white kernels like the sweetmeat called Turkish Delight. They have a faint sub-acid flavour, but otherwise are rather insipid. Their properties are highly salutary, and they are used to purify bad water and to keep the hunters’ blood clean in the absence of vegetable food. Their enormous trunks, often forty feet in circumference, are not wood but a sort of fibrous substance, so that a solid rifle bullet fired from short range will go through them. The baobab is indeed less a tree than a gigantic and salutary fungus; but in a distant prospect of landscape it has the scenic effect of large timber. An old Boer in the hunting party we had passed had given us an estimate of the distance to the next water; but, as it turned out, he was hopelessly wrong. It is nearly impossible to get a proper calculation of distance from country-people in South Africa. They are accustomed to calculate in hours, which of course vary in every district according to the nature of the road and the quality of the transport. Six miles an hour is the usual allowance; but when a Dutchman tries to calculate in miles he gets wildly out of his bearings. The hours method still sticks in their mind; and one man solemnly informed us that a certain place was six miles off for horses and ten for mules.

We outspanned for the night without water, and with the accompaniment of scherm and camp fires. Next morning we came suddenly out of the bush to a perfect English dell, where a little clear stream, the first running water we had seen, flowed out of a reed-bed into a rock pool. There were a few large trees and quantities of a kind of small palm. Under the doubtful shade of a baobab we breakfasted, and then went up the stream with our rifles to look for game. There was the usual superfluity of birds, but we saw no big game except a few bush-hogs. The stream ceased as suddenly as it began, and we followed up a dry sandy bed all but overgrown with a thorn thicket. A mile or so up we came on another pool, which was evidently the drinking-place of the bush, for the edges were trodden with the spoor of pig and monkey and a few large buck. Pig drink during the day, but the large game come to the water early in the morning or very late in the evening, and in the heat of mid-day go many miles into the bush. It was a hot business ploughing along in the deep sand, and I was very glad to return to the rock-pool and a bath on a cool slab of stone. It is a good bush-veld rule to follow the advice of Mr Jorrocks and sleep where you eat, and in the shade of the waggon we dozed till the cooler afternoon. The evening trek was in the old thorn-country, perfectly featureless, silent, and uninhabited. Since Malietsie’s location we had seen no Kaffirs except our own and the post-runners, and we were told that this whole tract of land is almost without natives. Even the water-holes, some of which are large and permanent, have failed to attract inhabitants. I am reminded of a story which has no application, but is worth recording. It was told to a burgher camp official by an old and deeply religious Boer, who was greatly pained at the experience. He fell asleep, he said, one night and dreamed; and, lo and behold, he was dead and at the gates of Paradise. An affable angel met him and conducted him to a place where people were playing games and laughing loudly, and were generally consumed with energy and high spirits. “This,” said his guide, “is the Rooinek heaven.” “No place for me,” said the dreamer; “these folk do not keep the Sabbath, and their noise wearies me.” Then he came to another place where there was much beer and tobacco, and roysterers were swilling from long mugs and smoking deep-bowled pipes to the strains of a brass band. “Again this intolerable row,” said my friend, “though the tobacco looks good—clearly the German paradise.” The next place they came to was a town where thin-faced men were running about buying and selling and screeching market quotations. My friend would not at first believe that this was Paradise at all, but his informant said it was the corner reserved for virtuous Americans. “Take me as soon as possible to the paradise of my own folk,” said the dreamer; “I am tired of these uitlander heavens.” And then it seemed to him he was taken to a very beautiful country place, with rich green veld, seamed with water-furrows, and huge orchards of peaches and nartjes, and pleasant little houses with broad stoeps. The soul of my friend was ravished at the sight. Clearly, he thought, the Boers are God’s chosen folk, and he was about to select his farm when a thought struck him. “But where are all our people?” he asked. “Alas!” said the affable angel, dropping a tear, “it pains me to tell you that they are all in the Other Place.”

Our evening outspan was below the kopjes where the copper mines lie, and a few tracks in the veld and an empty tin or two gave warning of human habitation. These copper mines, which are about to be thoroughly exploited by Johannesburg companies, are old Kaffir workings, and, possibly, from some of the remains, Phoenician. The scenery suddenly became very peculiar,—English park-land, but with a tint of green which I have never seen before, a kind of dull metallic shade like some mineral dye. There were avenues of tolerably high trees, and a sort of natural hedgerow. The grass was short and rich, and but for the odd hue not unlike a home meadow. There were also a number of wood-pigeons of the same metallic green, so that the whole place was a symphony in a not very pleasing colour. Early next morning, leaving our transport behind, we set off for the Limpopo, which is about eight miles off. The thorn thickets appeared again, and the heat as we descended into the valley became oppressive. The altitude of the river is about 1500 feet, which is a descent of nearly 3000 feet from the high veld, and even in winter time the heat is considerable, for the soil is a fine sand, and no breeze penetrates to the wooded valley. I had seen the Limpopo a wild torrent in the passes of the Magaliesberg, and I had seen it a broad navigable river at its mouth; so I was scarcely prepared for the bed of dazzling white sand which here represented the stream. Main Drift is about a quarter of a mile wide, with a bed of bulrushes in the centre, and except for a thin trickle close to the Rhodesian shore it is as dry as the Egyptian desert. But twelve miles higher up it is a full stream with rapids and falls, crocodile and hippo, and some miles down it is a stagnant tropical lagoon. The water is there, but buried below Heaven knows how many feet of rock and sand. Those mysterious African rivers which disappear and return after many miles have a fascination for the mind which cares for the inexplicable. The valley is there, the bulrushes, the shingle, the water-birds, but no river—only a ribbon of white sand, or a few dusty holes in the rock. And then without warning, as the traveller stumbles down the valley, water rises before him like a mirage, and instead of a desert he has a river-side. There is little kinship between the torrent which rushes through Crocodile Poort and this arid hollow, but the great river never loses itself, and though it is foiled and swamped and strained through sand it succeeds in the end, like Oxus in the poem, in collecting all its waters, and pours a stately flood through the low coast-lands to the ocean. Ploughing about in the dry bed under the tropical noontide sun was dreary work, and put us very much in the position of Mr Pliable in the Slough of Despond, when he cried, “May I get out again with my life, you shall possess the brave country alone for me.” We saw a number of spur-winged geese, which for some reason the Boers call wild Muscovy, and a heron or two sailing down the blue. A little up stream there was a lagoon in the sand flanked on one side by rocks—a clear deep pool, where a man might bathe without fear of strange beasts. Wallowing in the lukewarm water, the glare exceeded anything I have known—blue water, white rock, and acres and acres of white sand between hot copper-coloured hills.

As we left the river we said farewell to the Road. It showed itself on the Rhodesian side climbing a knoll past a cluster of huts which had once been a police station, but had been relinquished because of the great mortality from fever. Thereafter it was lost among bush and a chain of broken hills. It cared nothing for appearances, being sandy and overgrown and in places scarcely a track at all, for it had a weary way to go before it could be called a civilised road again. There was something purposeful and gallant in the little trail plunging into the wilds, and with regret we took our last look of it and turned our faces southwards.

Our way back lay mostly through dense bush-land, and in the days of hunting and the evenings round the fire I saw much of the life and realised something of the fascination of this strange form of country. It has no obvious picturesqueness, this interminable desert of thorn and sand and rank grass, varied at rare intervals by a raw kopje or a clump of timber. The sun beats on it at mid-day with pitiless force, and if it was hot in the month of August, what must it be at midsummer? The rivers are sand-filled ditches, and the infrequent water is found commonly in brack lagoons; but, dry as it is, it has none of the wholesomeness of most arid countries, generally forming a hotbed of fever. An aneroid which I carried to give a flavour of science to our expedition, put its average elevation at between 1500 and 2000 feet. Agriculture is everywhere impossible, though some of the better timbered parts might make good winter ranching country. But, apart from possible mineral exploitation, the land must remain hunting veld, and indeed is favourably placed for a large-game preserve. The very scarcity of water makes it a suitable dwelling-place for the larger buck, who drink but once a-day; and the difficulty of penetrating such a desert will be an effective agent in preservation. A man walking through it sees nothing for days beyond the dead green of thorn bush, till he comes to some slight ridge and overlooks a round horizon, a plain flat as mid-ocean, crisped with the same monotonous dwarf trees. Hidden away round water-holes there are glades and drives with a faint hint of that softness which to us is inseparable from woodland scenery, but they are so few that they only increase by contrast the sense of hard desolation. The bush is very silent. Its dwellers make no noise as they move about, till evening brings the cries of beasts of prey. The nights in winter are intensely cold, with a sharpness which I found more difficult to endure than the honest frost of the high veld. The noons are dusty and torrid, and the thirst of the bush is a thing not easily coped with. But in three phases this desert took on a curious charm. That South African landscape must be bleak indeed which is not transformed by the mornings and evenings. For two hours after sunrise a chill hangs in the air, light fresh winds blow from nowhere, and the scrub which is so dead and ugly at mid-day assumes clear colours and stands out olive-green and rich umber against the pale sky. At twilight the wonderful amethyst haze turns everything to fairyland, the track shimmers among purple shadows, and every little gap in the bush is magnified to a glade in a forest. I have also a very vivid memory of a view from one of the small ridges in full moonlight. It was like looking from a hill-top on a vast virgin forest, a dark symmetrical ocean of tree-tops with a glimpse of ivory from an open space where the road emerged for a moment from the covert.

There is little danger in hunting here unless you are happy enough to meet a lion and so unfortunate as not to kill with the first shot. But it is very arduous and hot, the clothes become pincushions of thorns, face and hands are scratched violently with swinging boughs, and a man’s temper is apt to get brittle at times. In thick bush one can only hunt by spoor, and it is a slow business with a grilling sun on one’s back and a few obtuse native boys. The native is usually a good tracker, but he is an unsatisfactory colleague because of the difficulty of communicating with him. For one thing, even in a language which he understands, he does not seem to know the meaning of the note of interrogation. If he is asked if a certain mark is a black wildebeest’s spoor, he imagines that his master asserts that such is the case, and politely hastens to agree with him, whereas he knows perfectly well that it is not, and if he understood that he was being asked for information, would give it willingly. The difficulty, too, of hunting by a kind of rude instinct is that when this instinct is at fault he is left utterly helpless, and has no notion of any sort of deductive reasoning. If a native is once lost he is thoroughly lost, though his knowledge of the country may enable him to keep alive when a white man would die. I found also that my boys had so many errands of their own to do in the bush that it was difficult to keep them to their work. They scrambled for baobab fruit; they hunted for wolves’ and lions’ dung, from which they make an ointment, smeared with which they imagine they can safely walk through the bush at all seasons. The supreme danger of this kind of life is undoubtedly to be lost away from water and tracks. It is a misfortune which any man may suffer, but for any one with some experience of savage country, who takes his bearings carefully at the start and never gets out of touch with them, the danger is very small. In this country there is always some landmark—a kopje, a big tree, and in some parts the distant ranges of mountains—by which, with the sun and some knowledge of the lie of the land, one can safely travel many miles from the camp. For a man on a good horse there is no excuse, here at any rate, for losing himself; for a man on foot heat and fatigue and the closeness of the bush may well drive all calculations out of his head. Apart from other terrors, a night in those wilds is likely to be disturbed from the attentions of beasts of prey, and a man who has not the means of making a scherm or a fire will have to spend a restless night in a tree. To be finally and hopelessly lost is the most awful fate which I can imagine. It is easy to conjure up the details, and many uneasy nights I have spent in such dismal forecasts. First, the annoyance, the hasty pushing through the scrub, believing the camp to be just in front, and lamenting that you are late for dinner. Then the slow fatigue, the slow consciousness that the camp is not there, that you do not know where you are, and that you must make the best of the night in the open. Morning comes, and confidently you try to take your bearings; by this time others are seeking you, you reflect, and with a little care you can find your whereabouts and go to meet them. Then a long hot day, without water or food, pushing eternally through the dull green scrub, every moment leaving confidence a little weaker, till the second night comes, and you doze uneasily in a horror of nightmare and physical illness. Then the spectral awaking, the watching of a giddy sunrise, the slow forcing of the body to the same hopeless quest, till the thorns begin to dance before you and the black froth comes to the lips, and in a little reason takes wing, and you die crazily by inches in the parched silence.

I have said that the bush is without human inhabitants, but every now and then we found traces of other travellers. A dusty pack-donkey would suddenly emerge from the thicket, followed by two dusty and sunburnt men, each with some prehistoric kind of gun. Sometimes we breakfasted with this kind of party, and heard from them the curious tale of their wanderings. They would ask us the news, having seen no white man for half a-year, and it was odd to see the voracity with which they devoured the very belated papers we could offer them. They had been east to the Portuguese border and west to Bechuanaland and north to the Zambesi, pursuing one of the hardest and most thankless tasks on earth. The prospector skirmishes ahead of civilisation. On his labours great industries are based, but he himself gets, as a rule, little reward. Fever and starvation are incidents of his daily life, and yet there is a certain relish in it for the old stager, and I doubt if he would be content to try an easier job which curtailed his freedom. For, if you think of it, there is an undercurrent of perpetual excitement in the life, which is treasure-hunting made a business: any morning may reveal the great reef or the rich pipe, and change this dusty fellow with his tired mules into a nabob. Among the taciturn men who crept out of the bush every type was represented, from Australian cow-punchers to well-born gentlemen from home, whose names were still on the lists of good clubs. One party I especially remember, three huge Canadians, who came in the darkness and encamped by our fire. They had a ramshackle cart and two mules, and the whole outfit was valeted by the very smallest nigger-boy you can imagine. It did one good to see the way in which that child sprang to attention at sunrise, and, clad simply in a gigantic pair of khaki trousers and one side of an old waistcoat, lit the fire, made coffee for his three masters, cooked breakfast, caught and harnessed the mules, and was squatting in the cart, all within the shortest possible time. The Canadians had been all over the world and in every profession, but of all trades they liked the late war best, and made anxious inquiries about Somaliland. They were the true adventurer type,—long, thin, hollow-eyed, tough as whipcord, men who, like the Black Douglas, would rather hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep. After making fierce inroads on my tobacco, and giving me their views on the native question and many incidental matters, they departed into the Western bush, one man cracking the whip and whistling “Annie Laurie,” and the other two, with guns, creeping along on the flanks. I took off my hat in spirit to the advance-guard of our people, the men who know much and fear little, who are always a little ahead of everybody else in the waste places of the earth. You can readily whistle them back to the defence of some portion of the Empire or gather them for the maintenance of some single frontier; but when the work is done they retire again to their own places, with their eyes steadfastly to the wilds but their ears always open for the whistle to call them back once more.

August 1903.

---

CHAPTER XI.

THE FUTURE OF SOUTH AFRICAN SPORT.

The great days of South African sport are over, and there is no disguising the fact. Open any early record, such as Oswell or Gordon-Cumming, and the size and variety of the bag dazzles the mind of the amateur of to-day. Then it was possible to shoot lion in Cape Colony and elephant in the Transvaal, and to find at one’s door game whose only habitat is now some narrow region near the Mountains of the Moon. Turn even to the later pages of Mr Selous, and anywhere north of a line drawn east and west through Pretoria, there was such sport to be had as can now be found with difficulty on the Zambesi. The absence of game laws and the presence of many bold hunters have cleared the veld of the vast herds of antelope which provided the voortrekker with fresh meat, and the advance of industry and settlement have driven predatory animals still farther afield. From the Zambesi southward ten or twelve species of antelope may still be found in fair numbers, but the nobler and larger kinds of game, the giraffe, the koodoo, the black wildebeest, the two hartebeests, and the eland, are scarce save in a few remote valleys. The white rhinoceros is almost extinct and the ordinary kind uncommon. The hippopotamus, which is not a sporting animal, is still found in most tropical rivers; wild pigs—both bush-hog and wart-hog—are plentiful in the northern bush; but the graceful zebra is rapidly disappearing. Lion are still fairly easy to come on unawares anywhere north of the Limpopo, and in the mountains and flats of the north-eastern Transvaal. A few troops of elephant may exist unpreserved in the region between the Pungwe and the Zambesi, a few in Northern Mashonaland, with perhaps one or two in the Northern Kalahari. The war, on the whole, has been on the side of the wild animals, for though large herds of springbok and blesbok were slaughtered by the troops on the high veld, the native, that inveterate poacher, has been restrained from his evil ways by lucrative military employment, so that the northern districts are better stocked to-day than they were five years ago. But the fact remains that South Africa is no longer virgin hunting-veld. The game is disappearing, and, unless every care is taken, will in a few years go the way of the American buffalo. If we are to preserve for South Africa its oldest inhabitants, and keep it as a hunting-ground for the true sportsman, we must bestir ourselves and act promptly. In this, as in graver questions, an intelligent forethought must take the place of the old slackness.

Such a policy must take two forms,—the establishment of good laws for the preservation of game and the regulation of sport, and the formation of game-reserves. The best course would have been to declare a rigid close time for five years, during which no game other than birds and destructive animals should be killed, save in the case of damage to crops. The administrative difficulties, however, in the way of such a heroic remedy were very great, and the code of game laws, now in force in the Transvaal, seems to mark the limit of possible restriction. Under these power is given to declare a close season—a valuable discretionary power, since the season varies widely for different kinds of game—during which no game may be killed, and also to preserve absolutely any specified bird or animal in any specified district up to a period of three years. This would permit the absolute preservation of such animals as the springbok and the blesbok in certain parts of the country where they are scarce, without interfering with sport in other localities where they are plentiful. The ordinary shooting licence for birds and antelope is fixed at £3 for the season; but certain rarer animals have been made special game, and to hunt these permission must be obtained in writing from the Colonial Secretary and a fee paid of £25. The chief of these are the elephant, hippo, rhinoceros, buffalo; the quagga and the zebra; the two hartebeests, the two wildebeests, the roan and the sable antelope, the koodoo, eland, giraffe, and tsessabe. The wild ostrich and that beautiful bird the mahem or crested crane (Chrysopelargus balearica) are also included. Provision is made against the sale or destruction of the eggs of game-birds and the sale of dead game in the close season. Under this law the ordinary man, on the payment of a small sum, has during the season the right to shoot over thirty varieties of game-birds and over a dozen kinds of buck, as well as wild pig and lion and tiger-cats, if he is fortunate enough to find them, on most Crown lands and on private lands when he can get the owner’s permission,—a tolerably wide field for the sportsman. But restrictive laws are not enough in themselves; it is necessary to provide an equivalent to the sanctuary in a deer-forest, reserves where wild animals are immune at all seasons. The late Government established several nominal reserves, notably on the Lesser Sabi River and in the extreme eastern corner of Piet Retief which adjoins Tongaland; but no proper steps were taken to enforce the reservations. The new Government has strictly delimited the Sabi preserve and appointed a ranger; and certain adjoining land companies between the Sabi and the Olifants have made similar provisions for their own land. But one reserve in one locality is not enough. The true principle is to establish a small reserve and a sanctuary in each district. Part of the Crown lands in Northern Rustenburg, in Waterberg, in Northern and Eastern Zoutpansberg, and especially in the Springbok Flats district, might well be formed into reserves without any real injury to such agricultural and pastoral development as they are capable of. If the greater land companies could be induced to follow suit—and there is no reason why they should not—an effective and far-reaching system of game preservation could be put in force.[12] Finally, something must be done at once to stop native poaching, more especially the depredations of the wretched Kaffir dogs. Officers of constabulary, land inspectors, as well as all owners and lessees of farms, should have the power to shoot at sight any dog trespassing on a game-preserve or detected in the pursuit of game. An increased dog-tax, too, might stop the present system of large mongrel packs which are to be seen in any Kaffir kraal. A stringent Vermin Act, which is highly necessary for the protection of small stock like sheep and goats, would also help to prevent the slaughter of buck by wild dogs and jackals. But for the big-game hunter, in the old African sense, there is little or nothing left. The day of small things has arisen, and we must be content to record tamely our sport in braces of birds and heads of small buck, where our grandfathers recorded theirs in lion-skins and tusks and broken limbs. Big game there still is, but they are far afield, and have to be pursued at some risk to horse and man from fly and malaria. The lion, as I have said, is still fairly common in the district between Magatoland and the Limpopo, in the continuation of the Zoutpansberg east to the Rooi Rand, down the slopes of the Lebombo, and in the flats along the Lower Letaba, Olifants, and Limpopo. He is frequently met with in most parts of Rhodesia, though his habits are highly capricious, and while a tourist one day’s journey from Salisbury may see several, a man who spends six months hunting may never get a shot. Portuguese territory is still a haunt of big game, though the natives are doing their best to exterminate it, for the thick bush and the pestilent climate between the Lebombo and the sea will always make hunting difficult; and the Pungwe and its tributaries still form, at the proper season, perhaps the best shooting-ground south of the Zambesi. The elephant cannot be counted a quarry; and any man who attempts to kill an elephant in South Africa to-day deserves severe treatment, save in such preserves as the Addo Bush and the Knysna forest in Cape Colony, where they are rapidly becoming a nuisance. A few head of buffalo still survive, in spite of rinderpest, in the extreme Eastern Transvaal, as well as in Portuguese territory; and the eland, that noblest and largest of buck, is found along the Portuguese border. Report has it that in some of the Drakensberg kloofs between Basutoland and Natal a few stray eland may also be found. The beautiful antelopes, sable and roan, the exquisite koodoo, the blue wildebeest and the two hartebeests, roam in small herds on the malarial eastern flats, and a few giraffe are reported from the same neighbourhood. The gemsbok, with his lengthy taper horns, has long been confined to the remote parts of the Kalahari.

A big-game expedition will, therefore, in a few years’ time still be a possibility in Central South Africa, and with judicious management it may long remain so, for those who can afford the time and the not inconsiderable expense. The best place must remain the country between the Lebombo and the Drakensberg, and north from the Olifants to the Limpopo. Eastern Mashonaland, the Kalahari, and the Pungwe district will be available for those who care to go farther afield. The venue must be chosen according as a man proposes to hunt on horse or on foot. Both forms of sport have their attractions. On the great open flats of the Kalahari and Rhodesia no sport in the world can equal the pursuit of big game with a trained horse—the wild gallop, stalking, so to speak, at racing speed, the quick dismounting and firing, the pursuit of a maimed animal, the imminent danger, perhaps, from a charging buffalo or a wounded lion. This horseback hunting is, as a rule, pursued in a healthy country, every moment is full of breathless excitement, and success requires a steady nerve and a sure seat. But stalking on foot in thick bush makes greater demands on bodily strength and self-possession. The country is rarely wholesome, and in those blazing flats a long daylight stalk will tire the strongest. There is more need, too, for veld-craft, and an intimate knowledge of the habits of game; and when game is found, there is more need for a clear eye and a steady pulse, for a man hunting in veldschoen and a shirt is pretty well at the mercy of a mad animal. But in both forms of sport there is the same lonely freedom, the same wonderful earth, and the same homely and intimate comforts. No man can ever forget the return, utterly tired, in the cool dusk, which is alive with the glimmer of wings, and the sight of the waggon-lantern and the great fire at which the boys are cooking dinner. A wash and a drink—indispensable after a hot day lest a man should overstay his appetite; and then a hunter’s meal, which tastes as the cookery of civilisation seldom tastes. There is no reason why a hunter should not live well, far better than in any South African town, for he can count on fresh meat always, and, if he is fortunate, on eggs and fish and fruit. And then the evening pipe in a deck-chair, with the big lantern swinging from a tree, the great fire making weird shadows in the forest, and natives chattering drowsily around the ashes. Lastly, to an early bed in his blankets, and up again at dawn, with another day before him of this sane and wholesome life.

The chief dangers in African hunting, greater far than any from wild animals, are the chances of malaria and the possibility of getting lost. In many trips the first may be absent, but for a keen man it is often necessary to time his expeditions when the grass is short or when he has a chance of having the field to himself, periods which do not always coincide with the healthy season. It is not for anyone to venture lightly on a long hunting trek. But, granted a sound constitution, decent carefulness in matters such as the abstinence from all liquids save at meals, and from alcohol save before dinner, and the rigorous use of a mosquito-curtain, can generally bring a man safely through. The system can be fortified by small and regular doses of quinine, and the camp should be pitched, whenever possible, in some dry and open spot. These may seem foolish precautions to an old hunter whose body has been seasoned with innumerable attacks, but it is wise for one who has not suffered that misfortune to take every means to avoid it. To be lost in the bush is an accident which every man is horribly afraid of, and which may happen any day even to the most cautious, unless he has gone far in the curious lore of the wilds. There are men, of course, who are beyond the fear of it, chosen spirits to whom a featureless plain is full of intricate landmarks, and the sky is a clearer chart than any map. But the common traveller may walk a score of yards or so from the path, look round, see all about him high waving grasses somewhere in which the road is hidden, go off hastily in what seems the right direction, walk for a couple of hours and change his mind, and then, lo! and behold, his nerve goes and he is lost, perhaps for days, perhaps for ever. The ordinary procedure of a hunting trip, tossing for beats in the morning and then scattering each in a different direction, gives scope for such misfortunes. The safest plan is, of course, never to go out without a competent native guide; and, where this precaution is out of the question, the next best is to rely absolutely on some experienced member of the party who can follow spoor, sit down once you have lost your bearings, and wait till he finds you. A time is fixed after which, if a man does not return, it is presumed that he is in difficulties, and a search party is sent out; and naturally it saves a great deal of trouble if a man does not confuse the searchers by constantly going back on his tracks. If the hunter is on horseback he can try trusting his horse, which is said—I have happily never had occasion to prove the truth of the saying—to be able on the second day to go back to its last water. The whole hunting veld is full of gruesome tales of men utterly lost or found too late; and most hunting parties in flat or thickly wooded country come back with a wholesome dread of the mischances of the bush.

For the man who has little time to spare there remain the smaller buck. And such game is not to be lightly despised. The commonest and smallest are the little duiker and steinbok, shy, fleet little creatures which give many a sporting shot and make excellent eating. I suppose there are few farms in any part of South Africa without a few of them, and in some districts they are nearly as common as hares on an English estate. The springbok, a true gazelle, is more local in his occurrence, though large herds still exist in Cape Colony and parts of the Orange River Colony. Fair-sized herds are to be found, too, in the western district of the Transvaal and in certain parts of Waterberg and Ermelo. The blesbok is rather less frequent, though he used to be common enough, but there are numerous small herds in various parts of the country. These four varieties are the stand-by of South African shooting: other buck are to be sought more as trophies than in the ordinary way of sport. The water-buck, with his handsome head, and extremely poor venison, is common along all the sub-tropical and tropical rivers, but to shoot him requires a certain amount of trekking. So with the reed-buck, who haunts the same localities, though he is still found in places so close to the high veld as the southern parts of Marico and the Amsterdam district in the east. The beautiful impala, with his reddish coat and delicately notched antlers, is the commonest buck in the Sabi game-preserves, and extends over most of the bush veld, as well as parts of Waterberg and a few farms in the south-east. The klipspringer is found on all the slopes of the great eastern range of mountains, and is very common on the Natal side of the Drakensberg. He is a beautiful and difficult quarry, having a chamois-like love of inaccessible places, and being able to cover the most appalling ground at racing speed. The vaal rhebok and the rooi rhebok are found in small numbers in the same localities, and the latter is also fairly common in the wooded hills around Zeerust. Both the bush-pig and the wart-hog are plentiful in the bush veld, and on the slopes of the eastern mountains. Finally, the bush-buck, one of the most beautiful, and, for his size, the fiercest of all buck, is widely distributed among the woods of Cape Colony and Natal, and in the belts of virgin forest which extend with breaks from Swaziland to Zoutpansberg. Living in the dense undergrowth, he has been pretty well out of the way of the hunter who killed for the pot. He is an awkward fellow to meet at close quarters in a bad country, for, when wounded, he will charge, and his powerful horns are not pleasant to encounter. There have been several cases of natives, and even of white men, who have died of wounds from his assaults. His elder brother, the inyala, does not, so far as I know, appear south of the Limpopo.

The favourite South African method of shooting such game as the springbok is by driving him with an army of native beaters down wind against the guns. In an open country buck can be stalked on horseback or ridden down in the Dutch fashion of “brandt.” Elsewhere stalking on foot is the only way, a difficult matter unless the hunter knows the habits and haunts of the game. South African shooting seems hard at first to the new-comer, partly from the difficulty of judging distances in the novel clearness of the air, partly from the shyness of game, which often makes it necessary to take shots at a range which seems ridiculous to one familiar only with Scots deer-stalking, and partly from the extraordinary tenacity of life which those wild animals show,[13] limiting the choice of marks to a very few parts of the body. But experience can do much, and in time any man with a clear eye and good nerve may look for reasonable success. As has been noted in a former chapter, the best shots in the country, with a few exceptions, are to be found among English immigrants and Colonists of English blood. It is a kind of shooting which seems incredible at first sight to the ordinary man from home. I have known such a hunter to put a bullet at over 100 yards through the head of a korhaan, a bird scarcely larger than a blackcock: a feat which might be set down to accident were it not that the same man was accustomed to shoot small buck running at 200 yards with remarkable success. I should be very sorry to wage war against a corps of sharpshooters drawn from old African hunters.

There remain the numerous game-birds of the country. The finest is, of course, the greater paauw, but he is not very common in the Transvaal itself, though frequent enough in Bechuanaland, Rhodesia, and some parts of the northern bush veld. But of the bustard family, to which the comprehensive name of korhaan is applied, there are at least four varieties, two of which are very common. The bustard is an easy bird, save that he carries a good deal of shot, and has a knack of keeping out of range unless properly stalked or driven. The Dutch word “patrys,” again, covers at least eight varieties of the true partridge, and if we include the sand-grouse (called the Namaqua partridge), of two or three more. None of the South African partridge tribe are equal to their English brothers; but there is no reason why the English bird should not be introduced, and thrive well, and indeed experiments in this direction are being made. There are three birds which the Dutch call “pheasant,” two of them francolins and one the curious dikkop—birds which have few of the qualities of the English pheasant, but which are strong on the wing, offer fair shots, and make excellent eating. Quail are found at certain seasons of the year in vast quantities, and give good sport with dogs; but to my mind the finest South African bird, excepting of course the greater paauw, is the guinea-fowl, which the Dutch call by the quaint and beautiful name of tarentaal. There are two varieties, fairly well distributed—the ordinary crested (Numida coronata) and the blue-headed (Numida Edouardi). In parts of the bush veld they may be seen roosting at night on trees so thickly that the branches are bent with their weight. When pursued in broken country, what with dodging among stones and trees and his short unexpected flight, the guinea-fowl offers some excellent shooting, and as a table-bird he is not easy to beat. Wildfowl are an uncertain quantity on the uplands, though very common nearer the coast. They do not come to the rivers, but, on the other hand, they frequent in great numbers farm dams and the pans and lakes of Standerton and Ermelo. What the Dutch call specifically the “wilde gans” is the Egyptian goose; but several other varieties, including the spur-winged, are to be found. There are some ten kinds of duck, but it would be difficult to say which is the commonest, as they vary in different districts. The Dutch call a bird “teel” which is not the true teal, but the variety known as the Cape teal (Nettion capense), though there is more than one kind of proper teal to be met with. There is a black duck, a variety of pochard, a variety of shoveller, and a kind of shell-duck which is known as the mountain duck (bergeend). Wild pigeons exist in endless quantities; and I must not omit the pretty spur-winged plover, which cries all day long on the western veld, or that most cosmopolitan of birds, the snipe. Along the reed-beds of the Limpopo, in the bulrushes which fringe the pans in Ermelo, by every spruit and dam, you may put up precisely the same fellow that you shoot in Hebridean peat-mosses or on Swedish lakes, or along the canals of Lower Egypt. The little brown long-billed bird has annihilated time and space and taken the whole world for his home.

There is need of some little care lest we drive the wild birds altogether away from the neighbourhood of the towns. They are still plentiful, but, if over-shot, they change their quarters; and people complain that whereas five years ago they could get excellent shooting within three miles of their door, they have now to content themselves with a few stragglers. It is for the owners of land to see that its denizens are properly protected, for the disappearance of big game is an awful warning not to presume on present abundance. Some day we may hope to see the country farmer as eager to preserve his game as he is now to destroy it. There needs but the pinch of scarcity and the growth of a market value for shooting to turn the present free-and-easy ways into a perhaps too rigorous protective system.

There remain two sports which are still in their infancy in the country and deserve serious development—the keeping of harriers and angling. I say harriers advisedly, for though it would be better to stick to drafts from foxhound packs because of the greater strength and hardiness of the hounds, yet the sport can never fairly be dignified by the name of fox-hunting. The quarries will be the hare, the small buck, and in certain districts the jackal. The veld in parts is a fine natural hunting-ground, and the hazards, which will be wanting in the shape of hedges and banks, will exist very really in ant-bear holes and dongas. As the fencing laws take effect there will be wire to go over for those who have Australian nerves. The Afrikander pony is an animal born for the work, and once harrier packs were established there is every reason to believe that the Dutch farmers would join in the sport. The only two reasons I have ever heard urged against the proposal are—first, that hounds when brought out to South Africa lose their noses; and, second, that it would be hard to get a good scent in the dry air of the veld. The first is true in a sense, but only because a draft brought out from home is usually set to work at once and not acclimatised gradually to the change of air. There is no inherent impossibility in keeping a dog’s nose good, as is shown by the many excellent setters and pointers that have been imported. In any case, if the master of harriers breeds carefully he ought in a few years to get together a thoroughly acclimatised pack. As for the matter of scent, there is no denying that it would not lie on the ordinary hot dry day, but this only means that it will not be possible to hunt all the year round. I can imagine no better weather than the cool moist days which are common on the high veld in autumn and early spring, and even in summer the mornings up to ten o’clock are cool enough for the purpose. South African hunts must follow the Indian fashion, and when they cannot get whole days for their sport make the best of the early hours.

Fishing, I am afraid, has been in the past a neglected sport. The Boer left it to the Kaffir, and the uitlander had better things to think about. Had the land possessed any native fish of the type of the American brook-trout or the land-locked salmon, perhaps it would have been different; but in the high-veld streams the only notable fish are two species of carp, known as yellow-fish and white-fish, which run from 2 lb. to 6 lb., and the barbel, which may weigh anything up to 30 lb.[14] There are also eels, which may be disregarded. I do not think these South African fish are to be despised, for though they may be dead-hearted compared with a trout or a salmon, they give better sport than English coarse fish, and the barbel is quite as good as a pike. The ordinary bait is mealie-meal paste, a locust or any kind of small animal, a phantom minnow, and even a piece of bright rag. I have known both kinds of carp take a brightly coloured sea-trout fly, and give the angler a very good run for his pains. But the great South African fish is the tiger-fish, confined, unhappily, to sub-tropical rivers and malarial country. He is not unlike a trout in appearance, save for his fierce head, which suggests the Salmo ferox. In any of the eastern rivers—Limpopo, Letaba, Olifants, Sabi, Crocodile, Komati, Usutu, Umpilusi—he is the chief—indeed, so far as I could judge, the only—fish, and he is one of the most spirited of his tribe. He will readily take an artificial minnow, and also, I am told, a large salmon fly, but the tackle must be at least as strong as for pike, for his formidable teeth will shear through any ordinary casting line. His average weight is perhaps about 10 lb., though he has been caught up to 30 lb., but it is not his size so much as his extraordinary fierceness and dash which makes him attractive. When hooked he leaps from the water like a clean salmon, and for an hour or more he may lead the perspiring fisherman as pretty a dance as he could desire. If any one is inclined to think angling a tame sport, I can recommend this experiment. Let him go out on some river like the Komati on a stifling December day, when the sky is brass above and not a breath of air breaks the stillness, in one of the leaky and crazy cobles of those parts. Let him hook and land a tiger-fish of 20 lb., at the imminent risk of capsizing and joining the company of the engaging crocodiles, or, when he has grassed the fish, of having a finger bitten off by his iron teeth, and then, I think, he will admit, so far as his scanty breath will allow him, that an hour’s fishing may afford all the excitement which an average man can support.

So much for the fish of the country. But Central South Africa affords a magnificent field for the introduction and acclimatisation of the greatest of sporting fish. Ceylon and New Zealand have already shown what can be done with the trout in new waters, and in Cape Colony and Natal the same experiment has been made with much success. The high veld is only less good than New Zealand as a home for trout. To be sure, there is no snow-water, but there is the next best thing in water whose temperature varies very little all the year round. The ordinary sluggish spruits are of course unsuitable, but the mountain burns in the east and north are perfect natural trout-streams, with clear cold water, abundant fall, gravel bottoms, and all the feeding which the most gluttonous of fish could desire. The Transvaal Trout Acclimatisation Society, founded in Johannesburg in 1902, has established a hatchery on the Mooi River above Potchefstroom, and is making the most praiseworthy efforts, by the creation of local committees, to excite a general interest in the work throughout the country. It will still be some years before any trout-stream can be stocked and thrown open to anglers; but there is no reason why in time there should not be one in most districts. The Mooi and the Klip rivers near Johannesburg, the Magalies and the Hex rivers in Rustenburg, the Upper Malmani in Lichtenburg, every stream in Magatoland and the Wood Bush, the torrents which fall from Lydenburg into the flats, and all the many mountain streams which run into Swaziland from the high veld, may yet be as good trout-waters as any in Lochaber. The rainbow and the Lochleven trout will be the staple importation; but in some of the larger streams experiments might be made with the American ouananiche and the Danubian huchen. It is difficult to exaggerate the service which might thus be rendered to the country. If in the dams and streams within easy distance of the towns a sound form of sport can be provided at reasonable cost, the first and greatest of the amenities of life will have been introduced. At present on the Rand there are no proper modes of relaxation: most men work till they drop, and then take their jaded holiday in Europe. Yet how many, if they had the chance, would go off from Saturday to Monday with their rods, and find by the stream-side the old healing quiet of nature?

There is a future for South African sport if South Africa is alive to her opportunity. It is a country of sportsmen, and sport with the better sort of man is a sound basis of friendship. Game Preservation Societies are being started in many districts, and when we find the two races united in a common purpose, which touches not politics or dogma but the primitive instincts of humankind, something will have been done towards unity. The matter is equally important from the standpoint of game protection. The private landowner can do more than the land company, and the land company can do more than the Government, towards ensuring the future of sport. Many Dutch farmers have preserved in the past, and a general extension of this spirit would work wonders in a few years. Vanishing species would be saved, banished game would return, and our conscience would be clear of one of the most heinous sins of civilisation. As an instance of what can be done by private effort, there is a farm not sixty miles from a capital city where at this moment there are impala, rooi hartebeest, koodoo, and wild ostrich.

There are few countries in the world where sport can be enjoyed in more delectable surroundings. The cold fresh mornings, when the mist is creeping from the grey hills and the vigour of dawn is in the blood; the warm sun-steeped spaces at noonday; the purple dusk, when the veld becomes a kind of Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, full of fairy lights and mysterious shadows; the bitter night, when the southern constellations blaze in the profound sky,—he who has once seen them must carry the memory for ever. It is such things, and not hunger and thirst and weariness, which remain in a man’s mind. For the lover of nature and wild things (which is to say the true sportsman) it is little wonder if, after these, home and ambition and a comfortable life seem degrees of the infinitely small. And the others, who are only brief visitors, will carry away unforgettable pictures to tantalise them at work and put them out of all patience with an indoor world—the bivouac under the stars on the high veld, or some secret glen of the Wood Bush, or the long lines of hill which huddle behind Lydenburg into the sunset.

---