HANS’S CITY OF REST
Mr. Alston, Ernest, and Jeremy had very good sport among the elephants,
killing in all nineteen bulls. It was during this expedition that an
incident occurred which in its effect endeared Ernest to Mr. Alston
more than ever.
The boy Roger, who always went wherever Mr Alston went, was the object
of his father’s most tender solicitude. He believed in the boy as he
believed in little else in the world—for at heart Mr. Alston was a sad
cynic—and to a certain extent the boy justified his belief. He was
quick, intelligent, and plucky, much such a boy as you may pick up by
the dozen out of any English public school, except that his knowledge
of men and manners was more developed, as is usual among young
colonists. At the age of twelve Master Roger Alston knew many things
denied to most children of his age. On the subject of education Mr.
Alston had queer ideas. “The best education for a boy,” he would say,
“is to mix with grown-up gentlemen. If you send him to school, he
learns little except mischief; if you let him live with gentlemen, he
learns, at any rate, to be a gentleman.”
But whatever Master Roger knew, he did not know much about elephants,
and on this point he was destined to gain some experience.
One day—it was just after they had got into the elephant country—they
were all engaged in following the fresh spoor of a solitary bull. But
though an elephant is a big beast, it is hard work catching him up
because he never seems to get tired, and this was exactly what our
party of hunters found. They followed that energetic elephant for
hours, but they could not catch him, though the spoorers told them that
he was certainly not more than a mile or so ahead. At last the sun
began to get low, and their legs had already got weary; so they gave it
up for that day, determining to camp where they were. This being so,
after a rest, Ernest and the boy Roger started out of camp to see if
they could not shoot a buck or some birds for supper. Roger had a
repeating Winchester carbine, Ernest a double-barrelled shot-gun.
Hardly had they left the camp when Aasvögel, Jeremy’s Hottentot, came
running in, and reported that he had seen the elephant, an enormous
bull with a white spot upon his trunk, feeding in a clump of mimosa,
not a quarter of a mile away. Up jumped Mr. Alston and Jeremy, as fresh
as though they had not walked a mile, and, seizing their double-eight
elephant rifles, started off with Aasvögel.
Meanwhile Ernest and Roger had been strolling towards this identical
clump of mimosa. As they neared it, the former saw some guinea-fowl run
into the shelter of the trees.
“Capital!” he said. “Guinea-fowl are first-class eating. Now, Roger,
just you go into the bush and drive the flock over me. I’ll stand here,
and make believe they are pheasants.”
The lad did as he was bid. But in order to get well behind the covey of
guinea-fowl, which are dreadful things to run, he made a little circuit
through the thickest part of the clump. As he did so his quick eye was
arrested by a most unusual performance on the part of one of the
flat-crowned mimosa-trees. Suddenly, and without the slightest apparent
reason, it rose into the air, and then, behold! where its crown had
been a moment before, appeared its roots.
Such an “Alice in Wonderland” sort of performance on the part of a tree
could not but excite the curiosity of an intelligent youth.
Accordingly, Roger pushed forwards, and slipped round an intervening
tree. This was what he saw: In a little glade about ten paces from him,
flapping its ears, stood an enormous elephant with great white tusks,
looking as large as a house and as cool as a cucumber. Nobody, to look
at the brute, would have believed that he had given them a twenty
miles’ trot under a burning sun. He was now refreshing himself by
pulling up mimosa-trees as easily as though they were radishes, and
eating the sweet fibrous roots.
Roger saw this, and his heart burned with ambition to kill that
elephant—the mighty great beast, about a hundred times as big as
himself, who could pull up a large tree and make his dinner off the
roots. Roger was a plucky boy, and, in his sportsmanlike zeal, he quite
forgot that a repeating carbine is not exactly the weapon one would
choose to shoot elephants with. Indeed, without giving the matter
another thought, he lifted the little rifle, aimed it at the great
beast’s head, and fired. He hit it somewhere, that was very clear, for
next moment the air resounded with the most terrific scream of fury
that it had ever been his lot to hear. That scream was too much for
him; he turned and fled swiftly. Elephants were evidently difficult
things to kill.
Fortunately for Roger, the elephant could not for some seconds make out
where his tiny assailant was. Presently, however, he winded him, and
came crashing after him, screaming shrilly, with his trunk and tail
well up. On hearing the shot and the scream of the elephant, Ernest,
who was standing some way out in the open, in anticipation of a driving
shot at the guinea-fowl, had run towards the spot where Roger had
entered the bush; and, just as he got opposite to it, out he came,
scuttling along for his life, with the elephant not more than twenty
paces behind him.
Then Ernest did a brave thing.
[Illustration: “Ernest did a brave thing.”]
“Make for the bush!” he yelled to the boy, who at once swerved to the
right. On thundered the elephant, straight towards Ernest. But with
Ernest it was evident he considered he had no quarrel, for presently he
tried to swing himself round after Roger. Then Ernest lifted his
shot-gun, and sent a charge of No. 4 into the brute’s face, stinging
him sadly. It was, humanly speaking, certain death which he courted,
but at the moment his main idea was to save the boy. Screaming afresh,
the elephant abandoned the pursuit of Roger, and made straight for
Ernest, who fired the other barrel of small-shot, in the vain hope of
blinding him. By now the boy had pulled up, being some forty yards off,
and seeing Ernest just about to be crumpled up, wildly fired the
repeating rifle in their direction. Some good angel must have guided
the little bullet; for, as it happened, it struck the elephant in the
region of the knee, and, forcing its way in, slightly injured a tendon,
and brought the great beast thundering to the ground. Ernest had only
just time to dodge to one side as the huge mass came to the earth;
indeed, as it was, he got a tap from the tip of the elephant’s trunk
which knocked him down, and, though he did not feel it at the time,
made him sore for days afterwards. In a moment, however, he was up
again, and away at his best speed, legging it as he had never legged it
before in his life; and so was the elephant. People have no idea at
what a pace an elephant can go when he is out of temper, until they put
it to the proof. Had it not been for the slight injury to the knee, and
the twenty yards’ start he got, Ernest would have been represented by
little pieces before he was ten seconds older. As it was, when, a
hundred and fifty yards farther on, elephant and Ernest broke upon the
astonished view of Mr. Alston and Jeremy, who were hurrying up to the
scene of action, they were almost one flesh; that is, the tip of the
elephant’s trunk was now up in the air, and now about six inches off
the seat of Ernest’s trousers, at which it snapped convulsively.
Up went Jeremy’s heavy rifle, which luckily he had in his hand.
“Behind the shoulder, half-way down the ear,” said Mr. Alston,
beckoning to a Kafir to bring his rifle, which he was carrying. The
probability of Jeremy’s stopping the beast at that distance—they were
quite sixty yards off—was infinitesimal.
There was a second’s pause. The snapping tip touched the retreating
trousers, but did not get hold of them, and the contact sent a magnetic
thrill up Ernest’s back.
“Boom—thud—crash!” and the elephant was down dead as a door-nail.
Jeremy had made no mistake: the bullet went straight through the great
brute’s heart, and broke the shoulder on the other side. He was one of
those men who not only rarely miss, but always seem to hit their game
in the right place.
Ernest sank exhausted on the ground, and Mr. Alston and Jeremy rushed
up rejoicing.
“Near go that, Ernest,” said the former.
Ernest nodded in reply. He could not speak.
“By Jove! where is Roger?” he went on, turning pale as he missed his
son for the first time.
But at this moment that young gentleman hove in sight, and, recovering
from his fright when he saw that the great animal was stone-dead,
rushed up with yells of exultation, and, climbing on to the upper tusk,
began to point out where he had hit him.
Meanwhile Mr. Alston had extracted the story of the adventure from
Ernest.
“You young rascal,” he said to his son, “come off that tusk. Do you
know that if it had not been for Mr. Kershaw here, who courted almost
certain death to save you from the results of your own folly, you would
be as dead as that elephant and as flat as a biscuit? Come down, sir,
and offer up your thanks to Providence and Mr. Kershaw that you have a
sound square inch of skin left on your worthless young body!”
Roger descended accordingly, considerably crestfallen.
“Never you mind, Roger; that was a most rattling good shot of yours at
his knee,” said Ernest, who had now got his breath again. “You would
not do it again if you fired at elephants for a week.”
And so the matter passed off; but afterwards Mr. Alston thanked Ernest
with tears in his eyes for saving his son’s life.
This was the first elephant they killed, and also the largest. It
measured ten feet eleven inches at the shoulder, and the tusks weighed,
when dried out, about sixty pounds each.
They remained in the elephant country for nearly four months, when the
approach of the unhealthy season forced them to leave it—not, however,
before they had killed a great quantity of large game of all sorts. It
was a most successful hunt, so successful, indeed, that the ivory they
brought down paid all the expenses of the trip, and left a handsome
surplus over.
It was on the occasion of their return to Pretoria that Ernest made the
acquaintance of a curious character in a curious way.
As soon as they reached the boundaries of the Transvaal, Ernest bought
a horse from a Boer, on which he used to ride after the herds of buck
which swarmed upon the high veldt. They had none with them, because in
the country where they had been shooting no horse would live. One day,
as they were travelling slowly along a little before midday, a couple
of bull-vilderbeeste galloped across the waggon-track about two hundred
yards in front of the oxen. The voorlooper stopped the oxen in order to
give Ernest, who was sitting on the waggon-box with a rifle by his
side, a steady shot. Ernest fired at the last of the two galloping
bulls. The line was good; but he did not make sufficient allowance for
the pace at which the bull was travelling, with the result that instead
of striking it forwards and killing it, the bullet shattered its flank,
and did not stop its career.
“Dash it!” said Ernest, when he saw what he had done, “I can’t leave
the poor beast like that. Bring me my horse; I will go after him, and
finish him.”
The horse, which was tied already saddled behind the waggon, was
quickly brought, and Ernest, mounting, told them not to keep the
waggons for him, as he would strike across country and meet them at the
outspan place, about a mile or so on. Then he started after his wounded
bull, which could be plainly discerned standing with one leg up on the
crest of a rise about a thousand yards away. But if ever a vilderbeeste
was possessed by a fixed determination not to be finished off, it was
that particular vilderbeeste. The pace at which a vilderbeeste can
travel on three legs when he is not too fat is perfectly astonishing,
and Ernest had traversed a couple of miles of great rolling plain
before he even got within fair galloping distance of him. He had a good
horse, however, and at last he got within fifty yards, and then away
they went at a merry pace, Ernest’s object being to ride alongside and
put a bullet through him. Their gallop lasted a good two miles or more.
On the level, Ernest gained on the vilderbeeste, but whenever they came
to a patch of ant-bear holes or a ridge of stones, the vilderbeeste had
the pull, and drew away again. At last they came to a dry pan or lake
about half a mile broad, crowded with hundreds of buck of all sorts,
which scampered away as they came tearing along. Here Ernest at length
drew up level with his quarry, and grasping the rifle with his right
hand, tried to get it so that he could put a bullet through the beast,
and drop him. But it was no easy matter, as any one who has ever tried
it will know, and, while he was still making up his mind, the
vilderbeeste slewed round, and came at him bravely. Had his horse been
unused to the work, he must have had his inside ripped out by the
crooked horns; but he was an old hunter, and equal to the occasion. To
turn was impossible, the speed was too great, but he managed to slew,
with the result that the charging animal brushed his head, instead of
landing himself in his belly. At the same moment Ernest stretched out
his rifle and pulled the trigger, and, as it chanced, put the bullet
right through the vilderbeeste and dropped him dead.
Then he pulled up, and, dismounting, cut off some of the best of the
beef with his hunting-knife, stowed it away in a saddle-bag, and set
off on his horse, now pretty well fagged, to find the waggons. But to
find a waggon-track on the great veldt, unless you have in the first
instance taken the most careful bearings, is almost as difficult as it
would be to return from a distance to any given spot on the ocean
without a compass. There are no trees nor hills to guide the traveller;
nothing but a vast wilderness of land resembling a sea petrified in a
heavy swell.
Ernest rode on for three or four miles, as he thought, retracing his
steps over the line of country he had traversed, and at last, to his
joy, struck the path. There were waggon-tracks on it; but he thought
they did not look quite fresh. However, he followed them _faute de
mieux_ for some five miles. Then he became convinced that they could
not have been made by his waggons. He had overshot the mark, and must
hark back. So he turned his weary horse’s head, and made his way along
the road to the spot where his spoor struck into it. The waggons must
be outspanned, waiting for him a little farther back. He went on, one
mile, two, three—no waggons. A little to the left of the road was an
eminence. He rode to it, and up and scanned the horizon. O joy! there
far away, five or six miles off, was the white cap of a waggon. He rode
to it straight across country. Once he got bogged in a vlei or swamp,
and had to throw himself off, and drag his horse out by the bridle. He
struggled on, and at last came to the dip in which he had seen the
waggon-tent. It was a great white stone perched on a mound of brown
ones.
By this time he had utterly lost his reckoning. Just then, to make
matters worse, a thunder-shower came up with a bitter wind, and
drenched him to the skin. The rain passed, but the wind did not. It
blew like ice, and chilled his frame, enervated with the tropical heat
in which he had been living, through and through. He wandered on
aimlessly, till suddenly his tired horse put his foot in a hole and
fell heavily, throwing him on to his head and shoulder. For a few
minutes his senses left him; but he recovered, and, mounting his
worn-out horse, wandered on again. Luckily, he had broken no bones. Had
he done so, he would probably have perished miserably in that lonely
place.
The sun was sinking now, and he was faint for want of food, for he had
eaten nothing that day but a biscuit. He had not even a pipe of tobacco
with him. Just as the sun vanished he hit a little path, or what might
once have been a path. He followed it till the pitchy darkness set in;
then he got off his horse and took off the saddle, which he put down on
the bare black veldt, for a fire had recently swept off the dry grass,
and wrapping the saddle-cloth round his feet, laid his aching head upon
the saddle. The reins he hitched round his arm, lest the horse should
stray away from him to look for food. The wind was bitterly cold, and
he was wet through; the hyenas came and howled round him. He cut off a
piece of the raw vilderbeeste-beef and chewed it, but it turned his
stomach and he spat it out. Then he shivered and sank into a torpor
from which there was a poor chance of his awakening.
How long he lay so he did not know—it seemed a few minutes; it was
really an hour when suddenly he was awakened by feeling something
shaking him by the shoulder.
“What is it?” he said wearily.
“Wat is it? Ach Himmel! wat is it? dat is just wat I wants to know. Wat
do you here? You shall die so.”
The voice was the voice of a German, and Ernest knew German well.
“I have lost my way,” he said, in that language; “I cannot find the
waggons.”
“Ah, you can speak the tongue of the Vaterland,” said his visitor,
still addressing him in English. “I will embrace you!” and he did so.
Ernest sighed. It is a bore to be embraced in the dark by an unknown
male German when you feel that you are not far off dissolution.
“You are hungered?” said the German.
Ernest signified that he was.
“And athirsted?”
Again he signified assent.
“And perhaps you have no ‘gui’ (tobacco)?”
“No, none.”
“Good! my little wife, my Wilhelmina, shall find you all these things.”
“What the devil,” thought Ernest to himself, “can a German be doing
with his little wife in this place?”
By this time the stars had come out, and gave some light.
“Come, rouse yourself, and come and see my little wife. O, the pferd!”
(horse)—“we will tie him to my wife. Ah, she is beautiful, though her
leg shakes. O yes, you will love her.”
“The deuce I shall!” ejaculated Ernest; and then, mindful of the good
things the lady in question was to provide him with, he added solemnly,
“Lead on, Macduff.”
“Macduffer! my name is not so, my name is Hans; all ze great South
Africa know me very well, and all South Africa love my wife.”
“Really!” said Ernest.
Although he was so miserable, he began to feel that the situation was
interesting. A lady to whom his horse was to be tied, and whom all
South Africa was enamoured of, could hardly fail to be interesting.
Rising, he advanced a step or two with his friend, who he could now see
was a large burly man with white hair, apparently about sixty years of
age. Presently they came to something that in the dim light reminded
him of the hand-hearse in Kesterwick Church, only it had two wheels
instead of four, and no springs.
“Behold my beautiful wife,” said the German. “Soon I will show you how
her leg shakes; it shakes, O, horrid!”
“Is—is the lady inside?” asked Ernest. It occurred to him that his
friend might be carting about a corpse.
“Inside! no, she is outside, she is all over;” and stepping back, the
German put his head on one side in a most comical fashion, and,
regarding the unofficial hearse with the deepest affection, said in a
low voice, “Ah, liebe vrouw, ah, Wilhelmina, is you tired, my dear? and
how is your poor leg?” and he caught hold of a groggy wheel and shook
it.
Had Ernest been a little less wretched, and one degree further off
starvation, it is probable that he would have exploded with laughter,
for he had a keen sense of the ludicrous; but he had not got a laugh
left in him, and, besides, he was afraid of offending the German. So he
merely murmured, “Poor, poor leg!” sympathetically, and then alluded to
the question of eatables.
“Ah, yes, of course. Let us see what Wilhelmina shall give us;” and he
trotted round to the back end of the cart, which, in keeping with its
hearse-like character, opened by means of two little folding-doors, and
pulled out, first, two blankets, one of which he gave to Ernest to put
round his shoulders; second, a large piece of biltong, or sun-dried
game-flesh, and some biscuits; and, third, a bottle of peach-brandy. On
these viands they fell to, and though they were not in themselves of an
appetising nature, Ernest never enjoyed anything more in his life.
Their meal did not take long, and after it his friend Hans produced
some excellent Boer tobacco, and over their pipes Ernest told him how
he had lost his way. Hans asked him what road he had been travelling
on.
“The Rustenburg road.”
“Then, my friend, you are not more than one thousand paces off it. My
wife and I we travel along him all day, till just now Wilhelmina she
think she would like to come up here, and so I come, and now you see
the reason why. She know you lie here and die in the cold, and she turn
up to save your life. Ah, the good woman!”
Ernest was greatly relieved to hear that he was so near the road, as,
once upon it, he would have no difficulty in falling in with the
waggons. Clearly, during the latter part of his wanderings, he must
have unknowingly approached it. His mind, relieved upon this point, was
at liberty to satisfy his curiosity about his friend. He soon
discovered that he was a harmless lunatic, whose craze it was to wander
all over South Africa, dragging his hand-cart after him. He made for no
fixed point, nor had he any settled round. The beginning of the year
might find him near the Zambesi, and the end near Cape Town or anywhere
else. By the natives he was looked upon as inspired, and invariably
treated with respect, and he lived upon what was given to him, or what
he shot as he walked along. This mode of life he had pursued for years,
and though he had many adventures, he never came to harm.
“You see, my friend,” said the simple man, in answer to Ernest’s
inquiries, “I make my wife down there in Scatterdorp, in the old
colony. The houses are a long way off each other there, and the church
it is in the middle. And the good volk there, they die very fast, and
did get tired of carrying each other to be buried, and so they come to
me and say, ‘Hans, you are a carpenter, you must make a beautiful black
cart to put us in when we die.’ And so I set to, and I work, and work,
and work at my cart till I gets quite—what you call him?—stoopid. And
then one night, just as my cart was finished, I dreams that she and I
are travelling along a wide straight road, like the road on the high
veldt, and I knows that she is my wife, and that we must travel always
together till we reach the City of Rest. And far, far away, above the
top of a high mountain like the Drakensberg, I see a great wide tree,
rooted on a cloud and covered all over with beautiful snow, that shined
in the sunlight like the diamonds at Kimberley. And I know that under
that tree is the gate of the real Rustenburg, the City of Rest, and my
wife and I, we must journey on, on, on till we find it.”
“Where do you come from now?” asked Ernest.
“From Utrecht, from out of the east, where the sun rises so red every
morning over Zululand, the land of bloodshed. O, the land will run with
blood there. I know it; Wilhelmina told me as we came along; but I
don’t know when. But you are tired. Good! you shall sleep with
Wilhelmina; I will sleep beneath her. No, you shall, or she will
be—what you call him?—offended.”
Ernest crept into the cavity, and at once fell asleep, and dreamed that
he had been buried alive. Suddenly in the middle of the night there was
a most fearful jolt, caused by his horse, which was tied to the pole of
Wilhelmina, having pulled the prop aside and let the pole down with a
run. This Ernest mistook for the resurrection, and was extremely
relieved to find himself in error. At dawn he emerged, bade his friend
farewell, and gaining the road, rejoined the waggons in safety.