auctioneers selling all things under the sun to Kaffirs, Malays,
coolies, towards Rondebosch and Wynberg. At the Castle the electric tram
passed me, and I jumped on board and went, at the least, as fast as an
English slow train. The wind was blowing and the dust flew, but ahead of
us ran a huge electricity-driven water-cart, a very water tram, which
laid the red clouds for us. Yet in London we travel painfully in
omnibuses and horse-trams, and the rare water-cart is still drawn by
horses.
The road towards Rondebosch, where Mr Rhodes lived, is full of interest.
It reminded me dimly of a road in Ceylon: the colour of it was so red,
and the reddish tree trunks and heavy foliage were almost tropical in
character. Many of the houses are no more than one-storey bungalows;
half the folks one saw were coloured; a rare Malay woman flaunted
colour like a tropic bird. Avenues of pines resembled huge scrub; they
cast strong shadows even in the greyness of the day. Far above the huge
ramparts of Table Mountain lay the clouds, and the wind whistled
mournfully from the organ pipes of the Devil's Peak. In unoccupied lands
were great patches of wild arum, and suddenly I saw the gaunt Australian
blue gum, which flourishes here just as well as the English oak. Two
white gums shone among sombrest pines. They took my mind suddenly back
to the bush of the Murray Hills, for there they gleam like sunlit
lighthouses among the darker and more melancholy timber of the heights.
The houses grew fewer and fewer beyond Rondebosch, and at last we came
to Wynberg, a quiet little suburban town. The tram ran through and
beyond it, and I got off and walked for a while among the side roads.
And the aspect of the country was so quiet, and yet so rich, that I
wondered how any could throw doubts upon the wonderful value of the
country. Surely this was a spot worth fighting for, and, more certainly
still, it was a place for peace. A long contemplative walk brought me
back to Rondebosch, and again I took the train-like tram and went back
to busy Capetown.
In any new town the heights about and above it appeal strongly to every
wanderer. I had no time to spare for the ascent of Table Mountain, and
the tablecloth of clouds indeed forbade me to attempt it. But someone
had spoken to me of the Kloof road, which leads to the saddleback
between the Lion's Head and Table Mountain, so, taking the Kloof Street
tram, I ran with it to its stopping-place and found the road. There the
houses are more scattered; the streets are thin. But about every house
is foliage; in every garden are flowers. As I mounted the steep,
well-kept road I came upon pine woods. Across the valley, or the Kloof,
I saw the lower grassy slopes of Table Mountain, where the trees
dwindled till they dotted the hill-side like spare scrub. Above the
trees is a cut in the mountain, above that the bare grass, and then the
frowning weather-worn bastions of the mountain with its ancient
horizontal strata. It is cut and scarped into gullies and chimneys; for
the mountain climber it offers difficult and impossible climbs at every
point. Down the upper gullies hung wisps of ragged cloud, pouring over
from the plateau 4000 feet above the town.
On the left of the true Table Mountain there is a rugged and ragged
dip, and further still the rocks rise again in the sharper pinnacles of
the Devil's Peak. That slopes away till it runs down into the
house-dotted Cape flats, and beyond it lie Rondebosch, Wynberg and
Constantia. Across the grey and misty flats other mountains
rise--mountains of a strange shape which suggests a peculiar and unusual
geological formation.
Although the day was cool and the southerly wind had a biting quality
about it, yet the whole aspect of the world about me was intensely
sub-tropical. In heavy sunlight it would seem part of the countries
north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The close-set trees, seen from above,
appear like scrub, like close-set ti-tree. They are massed at the top,
and among them lie white houses. Beyond them the lower slopes of the
Devil's Peak are yellow and red sand, but the grey-green waters of the
bay, which is shaped like a great hyperbola, are edged with white sand.
Among the pines the rhythmic wind rose and fell; it whistled and wailed
and died away. Beneath me came the faint sound of men calling; there was
the clink of hammers upon stone.
But suddenly the town was lost among the trees, and when I sat down at
last upon a seat I might have been among the woods above the Castle of
Chillon, and, seen dimly among the foliage, the heights yonder could
have been taken for the slopes of Arvel or Sonchaud. A bird whistled a
short, repeated, melancholy song, and suddenly I remembered I had seen
no sparrows here. A blackcap stared at me and fled; its triple note was
repeated from bush to bush.
The wind rose again as I sat, but did not chill me in my sheltered
hollow. It rose and fell in wavelike rhythm like the far thunder of
waves upon a rock-bound coast. Then came silence, and again the wind was
like the sound of a distant waterfall. There for one moment I caught the
resinous smell of pine. It drew me back to the Rocky Mountains, and then
to the woods above Zermatt, where I had last smelt that healthiest and
most pleasing of woodland odours. I rose again and walked on.
Presently I gained a loftier height, and saw the Lion's Head above me, a
bold shield knob of rock rising out of silver trees, whose foliage is a
pale glaucous green, resembling that of young eucalypti. Then, turning,
I saw Capetown spread out beneath me, almost as one sees greater Naples
from the Belvedere of the San Martino monastery. The whitish-grey town
is furrowed into canyon-like streets. Beyond the town and over the flats
was a view like that from Camaldoli. The foreground was scrub and pine
and deep red earth, whereon men were building a new house. May fate send
me here again when the sun is hot and the under world is all aglow!
I came at last to the little wind-swept divide between Table Mountain
and the Lion's Head. Here Capetown was lost to me, and I stood among
sandy wastes where thin pines and whin-like bushes grow. And further
still was the cold grey sea with the waves breaking on a rocky point and
a little island all awash with white water.
Though beyond this divide the air was cold as death, the slopes of Table
Mountain sweeping to the sea were full of colour; deep, strong, stern
colour. When the sun shines and full summer rules upon the Cape
Peninsula the place must be glorious. Even when I saw it an artist would
wonder how it was that with such a chill wind the colour remained. And
above the coloured lower slopes this new view of Table Mountain
suggested a serried rank of sphinxes staring out across the desert sea.
The nearest peak of the mountain is weathered, cracked and scarred, and
it in are two chimneys that appear accessible only for the oreads who
block the way with their smoky clouds. In the far north-eastern distance
the grey headlands melted into the grey ocean. But beneath me were the
tender green of the birch-like silver tree and the rich young leaves of
the transplanted English oak.
VELDT, PLAIN AND PRAIRIE
Among the problems which remain perpetually interesting are those which
deal with the influence of environment on races, and that of races on
environment. What happens when the people are plastic and their
circumstances rigid? What when the people are rigid and unyielding, and
their surroundings fluent and unabiding? And does character depend on
what is outside, or does the dominant quality of a race remain, as some
vainly think, for ever? These are puzzling questions, but not entirely
beyond conjecture for one who has heard the siren songs of the African
veldt, the Australian plain, and the American prairie.
He who consciously observes usually observes the obvious, and may rank
as a discoverer only among the unobservant. Truth may be looked for, but
he who hunts her shall rarely find when the truth he seeks is something
not suited for scientific formulæ. The real observer is he who does not
observe, but is gradually aware that he knows. Sometimes he does not
learn that he is wise till long years have passed, and then perhaps the
mechanical maxim of a mechanical eye-server of Nature shall startle him
into a sense of deep abiding, but perhaps incommunicable, knowledge. So
comes the knowledge of mountain, moor and stream; so rises the Aphrodite
truth of the sea, born from the foam that surges round the Horn, or
floats silently upon the beach of some lonely coral island; and so grows
the knowledge of vast stretches of dim inland continents.
I spent my hours (let them be called months) in Africa seeking vainly
after facts that after all were of no importance. Politics are of
to-day, but human nature is of eternity. And while I sought what I could
hardly find, in one cold clear dawn I stumbled upon the truth concerning
the white people of the veldt, whom we call Boers. And yet it was not
stumbling; I had but rediscovered something that I had known of old in
other lands, far east and far west of Africa. When first I entered on
the terraces of the Karroo I tried to build up for myself the character
of the lone horsemen who ride across these spaces, and though I was
solitary, and saw sunrises, the construction of the type eluded me. I
saw the big plain and the flat-topped banded hills that had sunk into
their minds. I saw the ruddy dawn glow, and the ruddier glory of sundown
as the sun bit into the edge of the horizon, and I knew that here
somewhere lay the secret of the race, even though I could not find it.
And I knew too that I had discovered sister secrets in long past days;
and I saw that, not in the intellect as one knows it, but in some
revived instinct, revived it might be by one of the senses, lay the clue
to what I sought. What did these people think, or what lay beneath
thought in them? It was something akin to what I had felt somewhere,
that I knew. But the sun went down and left me in the dark; or it rose
clear of the distant hills and drowned me in daylight, and still I did
not know. Then there was the babble of politics in my ears, and I spoke
of Reform and such urgent matters in the dusty streets of windy
Johannesburg.
But one day, as it chanced, I came upon the secret; and then I found it
was incommunicable, as all real secrets are. For your true secret is an
informing sensation, and no sensation can resolve itself other than by
negatives. I had spent a weary, an unutterably weary, day in a coach
upon the Transvaal uplands, and came in the dark to the house of a Boer
who served travellers with unspeakable food and gave them such
accommodation as might be. It was midnight when I arrived, and all his
beds were full of those who were journeying in the opposite direction.
He made me a couch on the floor in a kind of lumber-room, and, softened
child of civilisation that I had become, I growled by myself at what he
gave, and wondered what, in the name of the devil who wanders over the
earth, I was doing there. And how could he endure it? How, indeed. I
fell asleep, and the next minute, which was six hours later, I awoke,
and stumbled with a dusty mouth into the remaining night, not yet become
dawn. Such an hour seemed unpropitious. My bones ached; I lamented my
ancient hardness in the time when a board or a sheet of stringy bark was
soft; I felt a touch of fever, my throat was dry, a hard hot day of
discomfort was before me. In the dim dusk I saw the mules gathered by
the coach, which had yet to do sixty miles. A bucket invited me; I
washed my hot hands and face, and walked away from the buildings into
the open. Then very suddenly and without any warning I understood why
the Boer existed, and why, in his absurd perversity, he rather
preferred existing as he was; and I saw that even I, like other
Englishmen, could be subdued to the veldt. The air was crisp and chill;
the dawn began to break in a pale olive band in the lower east; the
stars were bright overhead; the morning star was even yet resplendent.
But these things I had seen on the southern Karroo. It was not my eyes
alone that told me the old secret, the same old secret that I had known.
I knew then, and at once, as an infinite peace poured over me, that all
my senses were required to bring me back to nature, and that one alone
was helpless. Now with what I saw came what I heard. I heard the clatter
of harness, the jingle of a bell, the low of a cow, the trampling of the
mules. And I smelt with rapture, with delight, the complex odours of the
farm that sat so solitary in the world; but above all the chill moving
odour of the great plain itself. This, or these, made a strange,
primitive pleasure that I had known in Australia, in Texas, even in a
farm upon the edge of a wild Westmorland moor. My senses informed my
intellect. I shook hands with the creatures of the veldt, for I was of
their tribe. Even my feet trod the earth pounded by the mules, the
horses and the oxen, with a sensation that was new and old. Why did not
spurs jingle on my heels? I felt strong and once more a man. So feels
the Boer, and so does he love, but he cannot even try to communicate the
incommunicable. For, after all, the secret is like the smell of a flower
that few have seen. Its odour is not the odour of the rose, not that of
any lily, not that of any herb; it is its own odour only.
What is the difference, then, in those who ride the high Texan plateaux
or scour the sage-bush plains of Nevada, or follow sheep or cattle in
the salt bush country of the lingering Lachlan? There is much
difference; there is little difference; there is no difference. The
great difference is racial, the small difference is human, the lack of
any difference is animal and primæval. In all alike, in any country
where spaces are wide, the child that was the ancestor of the man arises
with its truthful unconscious curiosity and faith in Nature. Here it may
be that one gallops, here one trots, here again one walks. But all alike
pull the bridle and snuff the air and find it good, and see the grass
grow or dwindle, and watch the stars and the passing seasons, and find
the world very fresh and very sweet and very simple.
NEAR MAFEKING
To a man who has lived and travelled in the United States of America and
the not yet United States of Australia, there is one characteristic of
South Africa which is particularly noticeable. It is its oneness as a
country. And this oneness is all the more remarkable when we take into
consideration its racial and political divisions. A bird's-eye view of
America is beyond one; a similar glance at the seaboard of Australia
from Rockhampton even round to Albany (which is then only round half its
circle) gives me a mental crick in the neck. But in thinking of Africa,
south of the Zambesi, there is no such mental difficulty. Even the
existence of the Transvaal seemed to me an accident, and, if inevitable,
one which Nature herself protests against. Some day South Africa must be
federated, but if any politician asks me, "Under which king, Bezonian,
speak or die," I shall elect (in these pages at least) to die.
But though this disunited unity seemed to me a salient feature in
cis-Zambesian Africa, it was the differences in that natural ring fence
which attracted most of my attention as a story-writer even as a
story-writer who so far has only written one tale about it. I began to
ask myself how it was that, with one eminent exception, our African
fiction writers had confined themselves to the native races, and the
friction between these races and white men, Boer or English, when there
were infinitely more attractive themes at hand. Perhaps it may seem like
begging the question to call the political inter-play of the Cape
Colony, of the Transvaal, and the Free State more interesting than tales
in which the highest "white" interest appears in a love story betwixt
some English wanderer and an impossible Boer maiden, or such as relate
the rise and fall of Chaka and Ketchwayo. And yet to me the mass of
intrigue, the political friction, the onward march of races, and the
conflicts above and below board, called for greater attention than the
Zulu, even at his best.
To a novelist (who sometimes pretends to think, however much such an
unpopular tendency be hidden) environment and its necessary results are
of infinite interest. Upon the Karroo, even when in the train, I tried
to build up the aloof and lonely Boer, and, though I failed, there came
to me in whiffs (like far odours borne on a westerly wind) some
suggestions that I really understood deep in my mind how he came to be.
The chill fresh air of the morning, before the sun was yet above the
horizon, recalled to me some ancient dawns in far Australia: and then
again I thought of days upon the Texan plateaux. But still the secret of
the lone-riding Boer, who loves a country of magnificent distances,
escaped me.
But one early dawn, when I was half-way between Krugersdorp and
Mafeking, I came out upon the veldt in darkness, which was a lucid
darkness, and in the silent crisp air I stumbled upon the truth. Betwixt
sleep and waking as I walked I felt infinite peace pour over me. So had
the silent Campo Santo at Pisa affected me; so had I felt for a moment
among the ancient ruins of the abbey at Rivaulx. In this dawn hour came
a time of reversion. I too was very solitary, and loved my solitude. The
necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury
even less than I needed news. I cared for nothing that the men of a city
ask: there was space before me and room to ride. The lack of small
urgent stimuli, the barren growth of civilisation's weedy fields, left
me to the great and simple organic impulses of the outstretched world.
And in that moment I perceived that this silence is the very life of the
wandering Boer, even though he knows it not; for it has sunk so deep
into him that he is unaware of it. He belongs not to this age, nor to
any age we know.
For one long year, twenty years ago, I lived upon a great plain in
Australia, and now I remembered how slowly I had been able to divest
myself of my feeling of loneliness. But when I came at last to be at
home upon that mighty stretch of earth, which seemed a summit, I grew to
love it and to see with opened eyes its infinite charm that could be
told to none. I knew that the need of much talk was a false need: as
false as the diseased craving for books.
To feel this was true of the widespread wandering folks who once came
out of crowded Holland to resume a more ancient type, instructed me in
what a false relation they stand to the rolling dun war-cloud of
"Progress." They called in the unreverted Hollander to stand between
them and the men of mines, and now they love the Hollander as a man
loves a hated cousin, who is a man of his blood, but in nothing like
him. But anything was, and is, better than to stand face to face with
busy crowds. To have to talk, to argue, to explain to the unsympathetic
was overmuch. The veldt called to them: it is their passion. As one
labours in London and sinks into a dream, remembering the hills wherein
he spends a lonely summer, among Westmorland's fells and by the becks,
so the Boer, called cityward, looks back upon the wide and lonely veldt
which is never too wide and never lonelier to him than to any of the
beasts he loves to hunt.
But the fauna disappear, and ancient civilisations crumble. And those
who revert are once more overwhelmed by civilisation. It is a great and
pathetic story, a story as old as the tales told in stone by the
preserved remnants of prehistoric monsters.
Yet, speaking of monsters, what is a stranger monster (to an eye that
hates it or merely wonders) than the many-jointed Rand demon crawling
along the line of banked outcrop? I saw it first by day, when it seemed
an elongated wire-drawn Manchester in a pure air, but I remember it
best as I saw it when returning from Pretoria. First I beheld the gleam
of electric lights, and remembered the glow of Fargo in Eastern Dakota
as I saw it across the prairie. Then the mines were no longer separate:
they joined together and became like a fiery reptile, a dragon in the
outcrop, clawing deep with every joint, wounding the earth with every
claw, as a centipede wounds with every poisoned foot. The white residues
gleamed beneath the moon, from every smoke stack poured smoke: the
dragon breathed. Then the great white cyanide tanks were like bosses on
the beast; the train stopped, and the battery roared. That night, for it
was a silent and windless night, I heard forty miles of batteries
beating on the beach of my mind like a great sea. And men laboured in
the bowels of the earth for gold. But out upon the veldt it was very
quiet, "quietly shining to the quiet moon." I understood then that it
was no wonder if the simple and stolid Dutchman had a peculiar
abhorrence for a town, which, even at night, was never at rest. In
Johannesburg is neither rest, nor peace, nor any school for nobility of
thought; it destroys the pleasures of the simple, and satisfies not the
desires of those whose simplicity is their least striking feature.
Upon the veldt and the Karroo, and even through the Mapani scrub country
that lies north of Lobatsi, simplicity is the chief characteristic of
the scenery. As I went by Victoria West (I had spent the night talking
politics with the civillest Dutchmen) I came in early morning to the
first Karroo I had seen. The air was tonic, like an exhilarating wine
with some wonderful elixir in it other than alcohol, and though the
country reminded me in places of vast plains in New South Wales, it
lacked, or seemed to lack, the perpetual brooding melancholy that
invests the great Austral island. As I stood on the platform of the car,
the sun, not yet risen, gilded level clouds. The light reddened and the
gold died: and the sudden sun sparkled like a big star, and heaved a
round shoulder up between two of Africa's flat-topped hills, which were
yet blue in the far distance. Then the level light of earliest day
poured across the plateau, yellow with thin grass, which began to ask
for rain. The picture left upon my mind is without detail, and made up
of broad masses. Even a railway station, with some few gum trees, and
the pinky cloud of peach blossom about the little house, was
excellently simple and homely. A distant farm, with smoke rising beneath
the shadow of a little kopje, a band of emerald green, where irrigation
sent its flow of water, a thousand sheep with a blanketed Kaffir minding
them, filled the eye with satisfaction.
Out of such a country should come simple lives. By the sport of fate the
cruellest complexity of politics is to be found there.
And yet who can declare that the environment shall not in time exert its
inevitable influence on the busy crowding English, and make them or
their sons glad to sit upon their stoeps and smoke and look out upon the
veldt with a quiet satisfaction which is unuttered and unutterable? The
Karroo and the veldt do not change except according to the seasons; they
pour their influences for ever upon those who ride across them as the
Drakensberg Mountains send their waters down upon Natal beneath their
mighty wall. And even now the busy Englishman complains that his
African-born son is lazy and seems more content to live than to be for
ever working. Each country exacts a certain amount of energy from those
who live there; as one judges from the Boer, the tax is not over heavy.
And as in time to come the great centre of interest shifts north, as
now it seems to shift, one may prophesy with some hope, certainly
without dread of such a result, that a more energetic Dutch race, and a
less energetic English one, will fuse together, and look back upon their
childish quarrels with mere historic interest. Perhaps the Dutch in
those times will become the aristocrats, as they have done in New York;
they may even see their chance of going for ever out of politics. For
they never yet sat down to the political gaming-table gladly.
BY THE FRASER RIVER