"Keightley's--up yonder," he said. "That's the only hotel on the West
bank. There's a German shanty a mile or so higher up t'other bank, but
you'll be better here. Going on to `King,' I take it?"
"Where?"
"`King'--King Williamstown," he explained.
I was about to reply that I was a picked-up castaway, but thought better
of it in time. Such would be presumed to be destitute, and thus might
find initial difficulties as to accommodation. So I only answered that
that would do me.
Now a most weird noise attracted my attention, and I found that it
proceeded from a sight hardly less weird. Covering a ricketty jetty
which we were slowly approaching, a crowd of strange beings were
preparing for our reception after their own fashion. Some were clothed
in brick red blankets and some were clothed in nothing, but all were
smeared from head to foot with red ochre--and, as they swayed and
contorted, a thunder of deep bass voices accompanying the high yelling
recitative of him who led the chant, and beat time in measured stamping
on the boards, I wondered that the structure did not collapse and strew
the river with the lot of them. But their wild aspect and the grinning
and contortions gave me the idea of a crowd of hugely exaggerated
baboons in the last stage of drunken frenzy. But they were not drunk at
all. It was only the raw savage, disporting himself after his own form
of lightheadedness.
Up to this time my ideas as to the Kafir of South-Eastern Africa had
been vague. If I had thought of him at all it had been as a meek,
harmless kind of black, rather downtrodden than otherwise, and to whom a
kick and a curse would constitute a far more frequent form of reward
than a sixpence. But now as I stepped upon the jetty at East London, my
views on that head underwent a complete and lasting change. For these
ochre-smeared beings were brawny savages, at once powerful and lithe of
frame and with a bold independent look in their rolling eyes, which,
although their countenances were in the main good-humoured, seemed to
show that they were able and willing to hold their own if called upon to
do so. More than one of the group towered above me, and I am not short.
They crowded around, vociferating in their own tongue, and tried to
seize the bundle I carried--this, by the way, contained a change of
clothing which Morrissey had insisted on my accepting--and I began to
think of showing fight, when the surf-boat skipper came to my aid with
the explanation that they merely wanted to carry it for me, for a
consideration. But I was glad to get rid of the vociferous
musky-smelling crowd--little thinking what strange and wild experiences
awaited me yet at the hands of the savage inhabitants of this land, of
whom these were fair representatives. And here I was, thrown up, as it
were, upon this inhospitable coast, without a dry stitch of clothing
upon me.
Soon I found myself the fortunate possessor of a small whitewashed room
in the only "hotel" the place boasted--and its leading features were
flies and various weird and unknown specimens of the beetle tribe, both
small and great, which, attracted by the light, would come whizzing in,
blundering against the greasy flare which had attracted them--to their
discomfiture, or into my face--to mine; but at length I fell asleep, to
the unintermittent thunder of the surf upon the bar. But the said sleep
was troubled and fitful. The door, half glazed, was door and window
combined, and the night being sultry, this must perforce be left open,
and in the result I don't know how many frogs startled me out of my
slumbers by a weird, searching croak right at my bedside, but I do know
that at least three rats were playing hopscotch upon my counterpane at
once. And these, and other unconsidered trifles, ensured that precious
little sleep fell to my lot the first night I passed upon the soil of
Southern Africa, whither I had been thrown under so strange and
unforeseen a combination of circumstances.