PART III.

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THE AFRICAN COLONY

STUDIES IN THE RECONSTRUCTION

BY

JOHN BUCHAN

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MCMIII

TO THE

HONOURABLE

HUGH ARCHIBALD WYNDHAM,

IN MEMORY OF

OUR AFRICAN HOUSEKEEPING.

"The greatest honour that ever belonged to the greatest

Monarkes was the inlarging their Dominions, and erecting

Commonweales."--Captain JOHN SMITH.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY ix

PART I.

THE EARLIER MASTERS.

CHAP.

I. PRIMITIVE SOUTH AFRICA 3

II. THE GENTLEMEN-ADVENTURERS 18

III. THE GREAT TREK 33

IV. THE BOER IN SPORT 49

V. THE BOER IN ALL SERIOUSNESS 58

PART II.

NOTES OF TRAVEL.

VI. EVENING ON THE HIGH VELD 79

VII. IN THE TRACKS OF WAR 93

VIII. THE WOOD BUSH 113

IX. ON THE EASTERN VELD 129

X. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD 146

XI. THE FUTURE OF SOUTH AFRICAN SPORT 168

PART III.

THE POLITICAL PROBLEM.

XII. THE ECONOMIC FACTOR 189

XIII. THE SETTLEMENT OF THE LAND 255

XIV. THE SUBJECT RACES 284

XV. JOHANNESBURG 311

XVI. CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS 325

XVII. THE POLICY OF FEDERATION 348

XVIII. THE ARMY AND SOUTH AFRICA 368

XIX. THE FUTURE OUTLOOK 386

INDEX 400

INTRODUCTORY.

On the last day of May 1902 the signature at Pretoria of the

conditions of peace brought to an end a war which had lasted for

nearly three years, and had among other things destroyed a government,

dissolved a society, and laid waste a country. In those last months of

fighting some progress had been made with the reconstruction--at least

with that not unimportant branch of it which is concerned with the

machinery of government. A working administration had been put

together, new ordinances in the form of proclamations had been issued,

departments had been created and the chief appointments made, the gold

industry was beginning to set its house in order, refugees were

returning, and already political theories were being mooted and future

parties foreshadowed. But it is from the conclusion of peace that the

work of resettlement may fairly be taken to commence. Before that date

the restrictions of war limited all civil activity; not till the

shackles were removed and the civil power left in sole possession does

a fair field appear either for approval or criticism.

It is not my purpose to write the history of the reconstruction. The

work is still in process, and a decade later it may be formally

completed. Fifty years hence it may be possible to look back and

discriminate on its success or failure. The history when it is written

will be an interesting book. It will among other matters deal with the

work of repatriation, one of the most curious and quixotic burdens

ever borne by a nation, and one, I believe, to which no real parallel

can be found. It will concern itself with the slow and difficult

transference from military to civil government, the renascence of the

common law, the first revival of trade and industry, the restitution

of prisoners, and the return of refugees--all matters of interest and

novel precedents in our history. It will recognise more clearly than

is at present possible the problems which faced South Africa at the

time, and it will be in the happy position of judging from the high

standpoint of accomplished fact. But in the meantime, when we have

seen barely eighteen months of reconstruction, history is out of the

question. Yet even in the stress of work it is often sound policy for

a man to halt for a moment and collect his thoughts. There must be

some diagnosis of the problem before him, the end to which his work is

directed, the conditions under which he labours. While it is useless

to tell the story of a task before it is done, it is often politic to

re-examine the difficulties and to get the mind clear as to what the

object of all this strife and expense of money and energy may be.

Ideals are all very well in their way, but they are apt to become

very dim lamps unless often replenished from the world of facts and

trimmed and adjusted by wholesome criticism.

Such a modest diagnosis is the aim of the present work. I have tried

in the main to state as clearly as I could the outstanding problems of

South African politics as they appear to one observer. I say "in the

main," because I am aware that I have been frequently led against my

intention to express an opinion on more than one such problem, and in

several cases to suggest a policy. I can only plead that it is almost

impossible to keep a statement of a case uncoloured by one's own view

of the solution, and that it is better to give frankly a judgment,

however worthless, than to allow a bias to influence insensibly the

presentation of facts. For such views, which are my own, I claim no

value; for facts, in so far as they are facts, I hope I may beg some

little attention. They are the fruit of first-hand, and, I trust,

honest observation. Every statement of a case is, indeed, a personal

one, representing the writer's own estimate rather than objective

truth, but in all likelihood it is several degrees nearer the truth

than the same writer's policies or prophecies. South Africa has been

in the world's eye for half a century, and in the last few years her

problems have been so complex that it has been difficult to separate

the permanent from the transitory, or to look beyond the mass of local

difficulties to the abiding needs of the sub-continent as a whole.

Colonial opinion has been neglected at home; English opinion has been

misunderstood in the colonies. It may be of interest to try to

estimate her chief needs and to understand her thoughts, for it is

only thus that we can forecast that future which she and she alone

must make for herself.

Every one who approaches the consideration of the politics of a

country which is not his own, and in which he is at best a stranger,

must feel a certain diffidence. On many matters it is impossible that

he should judge correctly. What seems to him a simple fact is

complicated, it may be, by a thousand unseen local currents which no

one can allow for except the old inhabitant. For this reason an

outside critic will be wrong in innumerable details, and even, it is

probable, in certain broad questions of principle. But aloofness may

have the qualities of its defects. A critic on a neighbouring hill-top

will be a poor guide to the flora and fauna of the parish below; but

he may be a good authority on its contours, on the height of its hills

and the number of its rivers, and he may, perhaps, be a better judge

of the magnitude of a thunderstorm coming out of the west than the

parishioner in his garden. The insistence of certain South African

problems, familiar to us all, has made any synthetic survey difficult

for the South African and impossible for the newspaper reader at home.

We have forgotten that it is a country with a history, that it is a

land where men can live as well as wrangle and fight, that it has

sport, traditions, charm of scenery and weather; and in its politics

we are apt to see the problems under a few popular categories, rather

as a war of catchwords than the birth-pangs of a people. I have

attempted in the following pages to give this synthesis at the

expense, I am afraid, of completeness of detail. It is my hope that

some few readers may find utility even in an imperfect general survey

as a corrective and a supplement to the many able expositions of

single problems.

The title begs a question which it is the aim of the later chapters to

answer. South Africa is in reality one colony, and it can only be a

matter of years till this radical truth is formally recognised in a

federation. But some explanation is necessary for the fact that most

of the book is occupied with a discussion of the new colonies and with

problems which, for the present, may seem to exist only for them. At

this moment the settlement of the Transvaal and the Orange River

Colony is the most vital South African problem. On their success or

failure depends the whole future of the sub-continent. They show, not

in embryo, but in the strongest light and the clearest and most mature

form, every South African question. On them depends the future wealth

of the country and any marked increase in its population. They will be

forced by their position to be in the van of South African progress,

and to give the lead in new methods of expansion and development. We

are therefore fortunate in possessing in the politics of these

colonies an isolated and focussed observation-ground, a page where we

can read in large clear type what is elsewhere blurred and written

over. I do not suppose that this fact would be denied by any of the

neighbouring colonies; indeed the tendency in those states is to

manifest an undue interest in the affairs of the Transvaal, and to see

often, in matters which are purely local, questions of far-reaching

South African interest. On the ultimate dominance of the Transvaal

opinion naturally differs, and indeed it is a point not worth

insisting on, save as a further argument for federation. If South

African interests are so inextricably intertwined, it is clearly

desirable to have a colony, whose future is obscure but whose wealth

and power are at least potentially very great, brought formally into a

union where each colony will be one unit and no more, rather than

allow it to exist in isolation, unamenable to advice from sister

states and wholly self-centred and unsympathetic. It is sufficient

justification for the method I have employed if it is admitted that

the Transvaal question is the South African problem in its most

complete and characteristic form.

A word remains to be said on the arrangement of the chapters. I have

tried to write what is a kind of guide-book, not to details, but to

the constituents of that national life which is now in process of

growth. The reader I have had in mind is the average Englishman who,

in seeking to be informed about a country, asks for something more

than the dry bones of statistics--_l'homme moyen politique_, who wants

a _resume_ of the political problem, some guide to the historical

influences which have been or are still potent, an idea of landscape

and national character and modes of life. He does not ask for a

history, nor does he want a disquisition on this or that question, or

a brief for this or that policy, but, being perfectly competent to

make up his own mind, he wants the materials for judgment. The first

part consists of brief historical sketches, dealing with the genesis

of the three populations--native, uitlander, and Boer. The history of

South Africa, with all deference to the learned and voluminous works

of Dr Theal, can never be adequately written. Her past appears to us

in a series of vanishing pictures, without continuity or connection. I

have therefore avoided any attempt at a consecutive tale, as I have

avoided such topics as the War and the negotiations preceding it, and

treated a few historical influences in a brief episodic form. In the

second part the configuration of the land has been dealt with in a

similar way. A series of short sketches, of the class which the French

call "_carnets de voyage_," seemed more suitable than any attempt at

the work of a gazetteer. I am so convinced of the beauty and

healthfulness of the land that I may have been betrayed into an

over-minute description: my one excuse is that in this branch of my

task I have had few predecessors.

The third part is highly controversial in character, and is presented

with grave hesitation. Many books and pamphlets have informed us on

those years of South African history between the Raid and the Ultimatum,

and a still greater number have discussed every phase and detail of the

war. Another book on so hackneyed a matter may seem hard to justify. It

may be urged, however, that the question has taken a wholly different

form. Of late years it has been complicated by a division of opinion

based not only on political but on moral grounds, an opposition in

theories of national duty, of international ethics, of civic integrity.

South African policy before the war and during the actual conduct of

hostilities was by a considerable section of the English people not

judged on political grounds, but condemned or applauded in the one case

on moral pretexts and in the other on the common grounds of patriotism.

The danger of making the moral criterion bulk aggressively in politics

is that the criticism so desirable for all policies is neglected or

perfunctorily performed. Matters which, to be judged truly, must be

tried by the canons of the province to which they belong, are hastily

approved or as hastily damned on some wholly alien test. But with the

end of the war and the beginning of civil government it seems to me that

this vice must tend to disappear. Whatever our judgment on the past,

there is a living and insistent problem for the present. Whatever the

verdict on our efforts to meet the problem, it must be based on

political grounds. We are now in a position to criticise, if not

adequately, at least fairly and on a logical basis. But the old data

require revision. The war has been a chemical process which has so

changed the nature of the old constituents that they are unrecognisable

in a new analysis. I am encouraged to hope that a sketch of the

political problem as it has to be faced in South Africa to-day will not

be without a certain value to those who desire to inform themselves on

what is the most interesting of modern imperial experiments. It is too

often assumed in England that the real difficulties preceded war, and

that the course of policy, though not unattended with risks, is now

comparatively clear and easy. It would be truer to say that the real

difficulty has only now begun. I shall be satisfied if I can convince

some of my readers that the work to be done in South Africa is

exceedingly delicate and arduous, requiring a high measure of judgment

and tact and patience; that it is South Africa's own problem which she

must settle for herself; and above all, that while the result of success

will be more far-reaching and vital to the future of the English race

than is commonly realised, the consequences of failure will be wholly

disastrous to any vision of Empire.

To my friends in South Africa I owe an apology for my audacity in

undertaking to pronounce upon a country of which my experience is

limited. Had I not always found them ready to welcome outside

criticism, however imperfect, when honestly made, and to hear with

commendable patience a newcomer's views, however crude, I should have

hesitated long before making the attempt. I have endeavoured to give a

plain statement of local opinion, which is expert opinion, and

therefore worthy of the first consideration, and, though there are

phases of it with which I am not in sympathy, I trust I may claim to

have given on many matters the colonial view, when such a view has

attained consistency and clearness. But my chief excuse is that while

local opinion is still in the making, and politics are still in the

flux which attends a reconstruction, the outside spectator may in all

modesty claim to have a voice. It may be easier for a man coming fresh

to a new world to judge it correctly than for those ex-inhabitants of

that older world on whose wreckage the new is built.

PART I.

THE EARLIER MASTERS

CHAPTER I.

PRIMITIVE SOUTH AFRICA.

There are kinds of history which a modern education ignores, and which

a modern mind is hardly trained to understand. We can interest

ourselves keenly in the first vagaries of embryo humankind; and for

savagery, which is a hunting-ground for the sociologist and the

folk-lorist, we have an academic respect. But for savagery naked and

not ashamed, fighting its own battles and ruling its own peoples, we

reserve an interest only when it reaches literary record in a saga.

Otherwise it is for us neither literature nor history--a kind of

natural event like a thunderstorm, of possible political importance,

but of undoubted practical dulness. Most men have never heard of

Vechtkop or Mosega, and know Tchaka and Dingaan and Moshesh only as

barbarous names. And yet this is a history of curious interest and

far-reaching significance: the chronicle of Tchaka's deeds is an epic,

and we still feel the results of his iron arguments. The current

attitude is part of a general false conception of South African

conditions. To most men she is a country without history, or, if she

has a certain barbarous chronicle, it is without significance. The

truth is nearly at the opposite pole. South Africa is bound to the

chariot-wheels of her past, and that past is intricately varied--a

museum of the wrecks of conquerors and races, joining hands with most

quarters of the Old World. More, it is the place where savagery is

most intimately linked with latter-day civilisation. Phoenician,

Arab, Portuguese, Dutch, and English--that is her Uitlander cycle; and

a cynic might say that she has ended as she began, with the Semitic.

And meantime there were great native conquests surging in the interior

while the adventurer was nibbling at her coasts; and when we were busy

in one quarter abolishing slavery and educating the Kaffir, in another

there were wars more bloody than Timour's, and annihilation of races

more terrible than Attila ever dreamed of. We see, before our faces,

"the rudiments of tiger and baboon, and know that the barriers of

races are not so firm but that spray can sprinkle us from antediluvian

seas."

To realise this intricate history and its modern meaning is the first

South African problem. No man can understand the land unless he takes

it as it is, a place instinct with tradition, where every problem is

based upon the wreckage of old strifes. And to the mere amateur the

question is full of interest. The history of South Africa can never be

written. The materials are lost, and all we possess are fleeting

glimpses, outcrops of fact on the wide plains of tradition, random

guesses, stray relics which suggest without enlightening. We see races

emerge and vanish, with a place-name or a tomb as their only memorial;

but bequeathing something, we know not what, to the land and their

successors. And at the end of the roll come the first white masters of

the land, the Dutch, whom it is impossible to understand except in

relation to the country which they conquered and the people they

superseded. We have unthinkingly set down one of the most curious

side-products of the human family as a common race of emigrants, and

the result has been one long tale of misapprehension. It is this

overlapping of counter-civilisations, this mosaic of the prehistoric

and the recent, which gives South African history its piquancy and its

character. It is no tale of old populous cities and splendid empires,

no story of developing civilisations and conflicting philosophies;

only a wild half-heard legend of men who come out of the darkness for

a moment, of shapes warring in a mist for centuries, till the curtain

lifts and we recognise the faces of to-day.

Two views have been held on the subject of the present native

population. One is that it represents the end of a long line of

development; the other that it is the nadir of a process of

retrogression. The supporters of the second view point to the growing

weakness of all Kaffir languages in inflexions and structural forms,

while in the Hottentot-Bushman survival they see a degeneration from

a more masculine type. It is impossible to dogmatise on such a

matter. Degeneration and advance are not fixed processes, but recur

in cycles in the history of every nation. The Bushman, one of the

lowest of created types, may well be the original creature of the

soil, advancing in halting stages from the palaeolithic man; himself

practically a being of the Stone Age, and prohibited from further

progress by an arid and unfriendly land, and the advent of stronger

races. Of the palaeolithic man, who 200,000 years ago or thereabout

made his home in the river drifts, we have geological records similar

to those found in the valleys of the Somme and the Thames. On the

banks of the Buffalo at East London, in a gravel deposit 70 feet

above the present river-bed, there have been found rude human

implements of greenstone, the age of which may be measured by the

time the river has taken to wear down 70 feet of hard greenstone

dyke.[1] From the palaeolithic it is a step of a few millenniums to

the neolithic man, who has left his relics in the shell-heaps and

kitchen-middens at the mouth of the same stream--who, indeed, till a

few generations ago was an inhabitant of the land. The Bushman was a

dweller in the Stone Age, for, though he knew a little about metals,

stone implements were in daily use, and, with his kinsmen the Pigmies

of Central Africa, he represented a savagery compared with which the

Kaffir races are civilised. It is his skull which is found in the

shell-heaps by the river-sides. He was a miserable fellow, a true

troglodyte, small, emaciated, with protruding chest and spindle legs.

He lived by hunting of the most primitive kind, killing game with his

poisoned arrows. He had no social organisation, no knowledge of

husbandry or stock-keeping, and save for his unrivalled skill in

following spoor and a rude elementary art which is shown in the

Bushman pictures on some of the rocks in the western districts, he

was scarcely to be distinguished from the beasts he hunted. A genuine

neolithic man, and therefore worthy of all attention. In other lands

his wild contemporaries have gone; in South Africa the elephant, the

rhinoceros, and the buffalo survive to give the background to our

picture of his life. He himself has perished, or all but perished.

The Dutch farmers hunted him down and shot him at sight, for indeed

he was untamable. His blood has probably mixed with the Hottentot and

the Koranna; and in some outland parts of the Kalahari and the great

wastes along the lower Orange he may survive in twos and threes.

Originally he covered all the south-west corner of Africa, but in time

he had to retire from the richer coast lands in favour of a people a

little higher in the scale of civilisation. The origin of the

Hottentots is shrouded in utter mystery, but we find them in

possession when the first Portuguese and Dutch explorers reached the

coast. They, too, were an insignificant race, but so far an advance

upon their predecessors that they were shepherds, owning large herds

of sheep and horned cattle, and roaming over wide tracts in search of

pasture. They had a tribal organisation, and a certain domesticity of

nature which, while it made them an easy prey to warrior tribes,

enabled them to live side by side with the Dutch immigrants as

herdsmen and house-servants. The pure breed disappeared, but their

blood remains in the Cape boy, that curious mixed race part white,

part Malay, part Hottentot. Both Bushman and Hottentot, having within

them no real vitality, have perished utterly as peoples: in Emerson's

words, they "had guano in their destiny," and were fated only to

prepare the way for their successors.

For the rest the history of primitive South Africa is a history of the

Bantu tribes but for one curious exception. In the districts now

included in the general name of Rhodesia, stretching from the Zambesi to

the Limpopo, we find authentic record of an old and mysterious

civilisation compared with which all African empires, save Egypt, are

things of yesterday. Over five hundred ruins, showing in the main one

type, though a type which can be differentiated in stages, are hidden

among the hollows and stony hills of that curious country. Livingstone

and Baines first called the world's attention to those monuments, and Mr

Bent, in his 'Ruined Cities of Mashonaland,' provided the first working

theory of their origin. Since that date many savants, from Dr Schlichter

to Professor Keane, have elaborated the hypothesis, for in the present

state of our knowledge a hypothesis it remains. In those ruins, or

Zimbabwes, to use the generic Bantu name, three distinct periods have

been traced, and a fourth period, when it is supposed that local tribes

began to imitate the Zimbabwe style of architecture. The features of

this architecture are simple, and consist chiefly of immense thickness

of wall ornamented with a herring-bone, a chess-board, and in a few

instances a diaper pattern, enclosures entered by narrow winding

passages, and in some cases conical towers similar to the Sardinian

_nauraghes_. The discoveries by excavation have not been many, mainly

fragments of gold and gold-dust, certain bowls of soapstone and wood

ornamented with geometrical patterns and figures which may represent the

signs of the zodiac, some curious figures of birds, stone objects which

may be _phalli_, and rude stones which may be the sacred _betyli_. It is

difficult to judge of the purpose of the buildings. Some suggest forts,

some temples, some factories, some palaces: perhaps they may be all

combined, such as we know the early Ionian and Phoenician adventurers

built in a new land.

From the remains themselves little light comes, but we have a certain

assistance from known history. In early days, before the Phoenicians

came to the Mediterranean seaboard, their precursors, the Sabaeo-Arabians

or Himyarites of South Arabia, were the great commercial people of the

East. There was undoubtedly a large trade in gold and ivory with Africa,

and all records point to somewhere on the Mozambique coast as the port

from which the precious metal was shipped. The only place whence gold in

great quantities could have come is the central tableland of Rhodesia,

from which it has been estimated that the ancient output was of the

value of at least 75 millions. The temple of Haram of Bilkis, near

Marib, as described by Mueller, has an extraordinary resemblance both in

architecture and the relics found in it to the Great Zimbabwe. According

to Professor Keane, the Sabaeans reached Rhodesia by way of Madagascar,

and he finds in the Malagasy language traces of their presence. Ophir he

places in the south of Arabia, the emporium to which the gold was

brought for distribution; Tarshish, the port of embarkation, he

identifies with Sofala; and he finds in Rhodesia the ancient Havilah.

Others place Ophir in Rhodesia itself. According to the Portuguese

writer Conto, Mount Fura in Rhodesia was called by the Arabs Afur, and

some see in the names of Sofala and the Sabi river a reference to Ophir

and Sheba. Etymological proofs are always suspicious, save in cases like

this where they are merely supplementary to a vast quantity of

collateral evidence. When the Phoenicians succeeded to the commercial

empire of the Sabaeans, they took over the land of Ophir, and to them the

bulk of the Zimbabwes are to be attributed. Those later Zimbabwes and

the Sardinian _nauraghes_, which are almost certainly Phoenician in

origin, have many points of resemblance. The traces of litholatry and

phallic worship are Phoenician, the soapstone birds may be the vultures

of Astarte, and the rosette decorations on the stone cylinders are found

in the Phoenician temple of Paphos and the great temple of the Sun at

Emesa.

Such are a few of the proofs advanced on behalf of a hypothesis which

is in itself highly probable.[2] It is not a history of generations

but of aeons, and we cannot tell what were the fortunes of that

mysterious land from the days when the Phoenician power dwindled

away to the time when the Portuguese discovered the gold mines and

framed wild legends about Monomotapa. The most probable theory is that

the old Semitic settlers mingled their blood with the people of the

land, and as the trade outlets became closed a native tribe took the

place of the proud Phoenician merchants. In the words of Mr Selous,

"the blood of the ancient builders of Zimbabwe still runs, in a very

diluted form, in the veins of the Bantu races, and more especially

among the remnants of the tribes still living in Mashonaland and the

Barotsi of the Upper Zambesi." The Makalanga, or Children of the Sun,

whom Barreto fought, were in the line of succession from the

Phoenicians, as the Mashonas are their representatives to-day. In

Mashona pottery we can still trace the decorations, which are found on

the walls of the Zimbabwes: the people have something Semitic in their

features, as compared with other Bantu tribes; they know something of

gold-working, a little of astronomy, and in their industries and

beliefs have a higher culture than their neighbours. Their chiefs have

dynastic names; each tribe has a form of totemism in which some have

seen Arabian influences; and in certain matters of religion, such as

the sacrifice of black bulls and the observation of days of rest, they

suggest Semitic customs. So, if this hypothesis be true, we are

presented with a survival of the oldest of civilisations in the heart

of modern barbarism. The traveller, who sees in the wilds of

Manicaland a sacrifice of oxen to the Manes of the tribe, sees in a

crude imitation the rites which the hook-nosed, dark-eyed adventurers

brought from the old splendid cities of the Mediterranean, where with

wild music and unspeakable cruelties and lusts the votaries of Baal

and Astarte celebrated the cycle of the seasons and the mysteries of

the natural world--

"Imperishable fire under the boughs

Of chrysoberyl and beryl and chrysolite

And chrysoprase and ruby and sardonyx."

When the Portuguese first landed in East Africa the chief tribe with

which they came in contact was the Makalanga in Mashonaland, ruled by

the Monomotapa. But before their power waned they had seen that nation

vanquished and scattered by the attacks of fiercer tribes from the

north, particularly the Mazimba, in whose name there may lurk a trace

of the Agizymba, a country to which, according to Ptolemy, the Romans

penetrated. For the last four centuries native South Africa has been

the theatre of a continuous _voelkerwanderung_, immigrations from the

north, and in consequence a general displacement, so that no tribe can

claim an ancient possession of its territory. We may detect, apart

from the Mashonas, three chief race families among the Bantus--the

Ovampas and people of German South Africa; the Bechuanas and Basutos;

and the great mixed race of which the Zulus and the Kaffirs of Eastern

Cape Colony are the chief representatives. All the groups show a

strong family likeness in customs, worship, and physical character.

As a rule the men are tall and well-formed, and their features are

more shapely than the ordinary negro of West Africa or the far

interior. They have a knowledge of husbandry and some skill in

metal-working; they have often shown remarkable courage in the field

and a kind of rude discipline; and they dwell in a society which is

rigidly, if crudely, organised. The Custom of the Ancients is the main

rule in their lives, and such law as they possess owes its sanction to

this authority. The family is the social unit; and families are

combined into clans, and clans into tribes, with one paramount chief

at the head, whose power in most instances is despotic, as becomes a

military chief. In some of the tribes, notably the Bechuana-Basuto, we

find rudiments of popular government, where the chief has to take the

advice of the assembled people, as in the Basuto _pitso_, or, in a few

cases, of a council of the chief indunas. The chief's authority as

lawgiver is absolute, but his judgments are supposed to be only

declaratory of ancient custom. Socially the tribes are polygamous, and

sexual morality is low, though certain crimes are reprobated and

severely punished. The prevailing religion is ancestor-worship, joined

with a rude form of natural daemonism. The ordinary Bantu is not an

idolater like the Makalanga, but he walks in terror of unseen spirits

which dwell in the woods and rivers,--the ghost of his father it may

be, or some unattached devils. Ghost feasts are made at stated times

on the graves of the dead; and if the ghost has been whimsical enough

to enter the body of an animal, that animal must be jealously

respected. Each tribe has its totem--the lion, or the antelope, or the

crocodile--from which they derive their descent, one of the commonest

features of all primitive societies. There seem traces of a vague

belief in a superior deity, who makes rain and thunder and controls

the itinerant bands of ghosts--a great ghost, who, if properly

supplicated, may intercede with the smaller and more troublesome herd.

But abstractions are essentially foreign to the Bantu mind, and his

modest Pantheon is filled with the simplest of deities.

No priesthood exists, but it is possible for a clever man to learn

some of the tricks of disembodied spirits and frustrate them by his

own skill. In this way a class of sorcerers arose, who dealt in big

medicine and strong magic. They profess to make rain and receive

communications from the unseen, to cure diseases and give increase to

the flocks, to expound the past and foretell the future. This powerful

class is jealous of amateurs, and does its best to remove inferior

wizards; but they are always liable to be annihilated themselves by a

powerful chief, who is more bloodthirsty than superstitious.

Undoubtedly some of these sorcerers acquire a knowledge of certain

natural secrets; they become skilled meteorologists, and seem to

possess a crude knowledge of hypnotism. They are also physicians of

considerable attainments, and certain native remedies, notably a

distillation of herbs, which is used for dysentery in Swaziland, have

a claim to a place in a civilised pharmacopoeia. This rough science is

the only serious intellectual attainment of the Bantu, outside of

warfare. They have a kind of music which is extremely doleful and

monotonous; they have a rude art, chiefly employed in the decoration

of their weapons; but they have no poetry worthy of the name; and

their only literature is found in certain simple folk-tales, chiefly

of animals, but in a few cases of human escapades and feats of

sorcery. The lion is generally the butt of such stories, and the

quick wit of the hare and the knavery of the jackal are held up to the

admiration of the listeners.[3]

Such are the chief features of Bantu life, and so lived the natives of

South Africa up to the early years of last century. But about that

time a certain Dingiswayo, being in exile at Cape Town, saw a company

of British soldiers at drill, and, being an intelligent man, acquired

a new idea of the art of war. When he returned to his home and the

chieftainship of the little Zulu tribe, the memory of the soldiers in

shakos, who moved as one man, remained with him, and he began to

experiment with his army. He died, and his lieutenant Tchaka succeeded

to the command of a small but well-disciplined force. This Tchaka was

one of those born leaders of men in battle who appear on the stage of

history every century or so. He perfected the discipline of his army,

armed it with short stabbing spears for close-quarter fighting, and

then proceeded to use it as a wedge to split the large loose masses

which surrounded him. It was a war of the eagle and the crows.

Neighbouring tribes awoke one morning to find the enemy at their

gates, and by the evening they had ceased to exist. A wild flight to

the north began, and for years the wastes north and east of the

Drakensberg were littered with flying remnants of broken clans. All

the great deeds of savage warfare--the killing of the Suitors, the

fight in the Great Hall of Worms, Cuchulain's doings in the war of the

Bull of Cuailgne--pale before the barbaric splendours of Tchaka's

slaughterings, the Zulus became the imperial power of South-East

Africa, and their monarch's authority was limited only by the length

of his impis' reach. By-and-by his career of storm ceases. We find him

ruling as a severe and much-venerated king, arbitrary and bloodthirsty

but comparatively honest; a huge man, with many large vices and a few

glimmerings of virtue. He was succeeded by his brother, the monstrous

Dingaan, who was soundly beaten by the Boers in one of the most heroic

battles in history; he in turn gave way to his brother Panda, a figure

of small note; and the dynasty ended with Cetewayo and the blood and

terror of Isandhlwana and Ulundi.

After Tchaka the man who looms largest in the tale of those wars is

Mosilikatse, the founder of the Matabele. The Zulu conquests placed

terrible autocrats on the throne, and the marshal who incurred the

king's displeasure had to flee or perish. To this circumstance we owe

the Angoni in Nyassaland and the empire of Lobengula. About 1817

Mosilikatse with his impi burst into what is now the Orange River

Colony, driving before him the feeble Barolong and Bechuana tribes,

and established his court at a place on the Crocodile River north of

the Magaliesberg, where a pass still bears his name. He began a career

of wholesale rapine and slaughter, till, as Fate would have it, he

came in contact with the pioneers of the Great Trek. Some hideous

massacres were the result, but he had to deal with an enemy against

whom his race could never hope to stand. The Boers, under Uys and

Potgieter, drove him from his kraal, impounded his ill-gotten cattle,

and finally, in a great battle on the Marico River, defeated him so

thoroughly that he fled north of the Limpopo and left the country for

ever. From the little we know of him he was a cruel and treacherous

chief, inferior in strength to Tchaka, as he was utterly inferior to

Moshesh in statesmanship. But the men he led had the true Zulu

fighting spirit, and in the Matabele, under his son Lobengula, we have

learned something of the warriors of Mosilikatse.

A throne which, as with the Zulus and their offshoots, had no strong

religious sanction, must subsist either by continued success in battle

or a studious statesmanship. Tchaka is an instance of the first;

Moshesh, the founder of the Basuto power, is a signal example of the

second. The Basutos were driven down from the north by the Zulu

advance, and found shelter in the wild tangle of mountains which

cradle the infant Orange and Caledon rivers. Moshesh, who had no

hereditary claim to a throne, won his power by his own abilities, and

on the mountain of Thaba Bosigo established his royal kraal. The name

of the "Chief of the Mountain" is written larger even than Tchaka's

over South African history, and to-day his people are the only tribe

who have any substantive independence. Alone among native chiefs he

showed the intellect of a trained statesman, and a tireless patience

which is only too rare in the annals of statesmanship. The presence of

French missionaries at his court gave him the means of instruction in

European ways, and he was far too clever to have any prejudice against

so startling a departure from the habits of his race. He watched the

dissensions of the rival white peoples, and quietly and cautiously

profited by their blunders. He made war against them as a tactical

measure, and after an undoubted victory increased his power by making

a diplomatic peace. He left his tribe riches and security, and the

history of Basutoland since his day is one long commentary on the

surprising talents of its founder. How far the credit is his and how

far it belongs to his advisers we cannot tell; but we can admire a

character so liberal as to accept advice, and a mind so shrewd that it

saw unerringly its own advantage. There is none of the wild glamour of

conquest about him, but there is a more abiding reputation for a far

more intricate work; for, like another statesman, he could make a

small town a great city--and with the minimum of expense.

With the death of Moshesh the history of South Africa becomes almost

exclusively the history of its white masters. It is an old country, as

old as time, the prey of many conquerors, but with it all a patient

and mysterious land. Civilisations come and go, and after a millennium

or two come others who speculate wildly on the relics of the old. In

some future century (who knows?), when the Rand is covered with thick

bush and once more the haunt of game, some enlightened sportsman,

hunting in his shirt after the bush-veld manner, may clear the

undergrowth from the workings of the Main Reef and write a chapter

such as this on the doings of earlier adventurers.

[1] An interesting sketch of the palaeolithic remains in South

Africa is contained in two essays appended to Dr Alfred

Hillier's 'Raid and Reform' (1898).

[2] The chief authorities on this curious subject are Mr

Bent's 'Ruined Cities of Mashonaland,' Dr Schlichter's

papers in the 'Geographical Journal,' Professor Keane's

'Gold of Ophir,' and Dr Carl Peters' 'Eldorado of the

Ancients.' Mr Wilmot's 'Monomotapa' contains an

interesting collection of historical references from

Phoenician, Arabian, and Portuguese sources; and in 'The

Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia,' by Messrs Hall and Neal,

there is a very complete description of the ruins

examined up to date (1902), and a valuable digest of the

various theories on the subject.

[3] There is an account of Bantu life in Dr Theal's

'Portuguese in South Africa.' The same author's 'Kaffir

Folk-lore' and M. Casalis' 'Les Bassoutos' contain much

information on their customs and folk-lore; while Bishop

Callaway's 'Nursery Tales of the Zulus,' M. Jacottet's

'Contes Populaires des Bassoutos,' and M. Junod's

'Chants et Contes des Baronga' and 'Nouveaux Contes

Ronga' are interesting collections of folk-tales.

CHAPTER II.

THE GENTLEMEN-ADVENTURERS.

The world's changes, so philosophers have observed, spring from small

origins, though their reason and their justification may be ample

enough, and exercise the learned for a thousand years. A sailor's

tale, a book in an old library, may set the adventurer off on his

voyages, and presently empires arise, and his fatherland alters its

history. The world moves to no measured tune; everywhere there are

sudden breaks, paradoxes, high enterprises which end in smoke, and

pedestrian beginnings which issue in the imperial purple. All things

have their ground in theory, and by-and-by a dismal post-mortem

science will discover impulses which the adventurer never dreamed of.

Few lands, even the most remote, are without this variegated history,

and the crudest commercial power is built up on the _debris_ of

romance. South Africa, which is to-day, and to most men, a parvenu

country, founded on the Stock Exchange, has odd incidents in her

pedigree. Eliminate all the prehistoric guesses, strike out the Dutch,

and the Old World has still had its share in her fashioning. Europe

may seem only yesterday to have finally sealed her conquest, but she

has been trying her hand at it for five hundred years. And the result

of the oldest struggle has been a curious story of failure--often

heroic, seldom wise, but always fascinating, as such stories must be.

It is associated with one of the smallest, and to-day the least

enterprising, of European peoples; and it has issued in Portugal's

most notable over-sea possession. Every nation has its holy land of

endeavour--England in India, France in Algiers, Russia in Turkestan.

Such was South Africa to Portugal; much what Sicily was to the

Athenians, the place linked with all her hopes and with her direst

misfortunes.

Happily the adventure was not without its chroniclers. The Dominican

friar, dos Santos,[4] has sketched for us the empire at its zenith,

and de Barros, the Portuguese Secretary for the Indies, has piously

narrated its beginnings. But the matter-of-fact histories disguise the

real daring of the exploit. The chivalry of Europe in its most

characteristic form was carried 8000 miles from home to an unknown

land; civilisation of a kind, a Christian church, a code of honour,

the rudiments of law and commerce, and the amenities of life, were

planted on a narrow malarial seaboard by men who had taken years in

the voyage, and had scarcely a hope of return. It is said that a great

part of courage lies in having done the thing before, but there was no

such ingredient in the valour of those adventurers. Risking all on a

dream, they set off on their ten-year excursions, holding an almost

certain death as a fair stake in the game. The tenth who survived set

themselves cheerfully to transform their discoveries into a national

asset. They colonised as whole-heartedly, if not as wisely, as any

nation in the world. And in spite of the narrowest and most pragmatic

of cultures, they proved themselves singularly adaptable. The

Portuguese gentlemen, for whom the Cancioneiros were sung, became

Africans in everything but blood, adopting a new land under their old

flag, and doing their best to Christianise and colonise it. It was not

their fault that the unalterable laws of trade and the destinies of

races shattered in time the fabric at which they had laboured.

In 1445, the year in which Diniz Dias is reported to have rounded Cape

Verd, the Portuguese were the most daring seamen in Europe. Dwelling

on a promontory, they naturally turned their eyes southward and

westward, when peace and a moderate wealth gave them leisure for

fancies. Those were the days of the foreglow of the Renaissance.

Constantinople had not yet fallen, but the spirit of inquiry was

abroad, and a fresh wind had blown among scholastic cobwebs. The

Church had her share in the revival. A belated missionary, or, as it

may be, commercial, zeal stirred the ecclesiastical powers. Fresh

lands might be won for the Cross, and fresh moneys to build new abbeys

and endow new bishoprics. The merchants of Lisbon and Oporto saw gold

in every traveller's tale, and gladly risked a bark on a promising

undertaking. There lived, too, at the time a sagacious prince, Henry

the Navigator, the son of Joao I. and Philippa of Lancaster, himself

an amateur of colonisation, who set the fashion for courtiers and

citizens. So the young Portuguese squire, trained in the pride of his

caste, his mind nurtured on chivalrous tales, fired readily at the

strange rumours, and found a peaceful life among his vineyards no

satisfying career for a man. To him the white sea-wall of the harbour

was the boundary of the unknown. Out in the west lay the Purple

Islands of King Juba, the forgotten Atlantis, the lost Hesperides,

and dim classical recollections from the monastery school gave

authority to his fancies. There were but two careers for a gentleman,

arms and adventure, and the latter was for the moment the true magnet.

To him it might be given to find the Golden City, the Ophir of King

Solomon, or to penetrate beyond the deserts to where Prester John[5]

ruled his wild empire in the fear of God. And all the while in Europe

men were wrangling over creeds and syllogisms, questioning the powers

of the Church, grumbling over dogmas, dying for a few square miles of

territory. What wonder if to high-bred, high-spirited youth Europe

seemed all too narrow--especially to youth in that south-west corner

cut off by the sierras from the world? What mattered desperate peril

so long as it had daylight and honour in it? So with hope at his prow

and a clear conscience the adventurer set out on his travels.

The first object of Portuguese enterprise was Bilad Ghana, the modern

Senegal, which they knew of from Arab geographers. The land route

across the Sahara was closed to them, so they were compelled to reach

it by sea. It was Henry's dream to make the country a Portuguese

dependency, and Christianise it under the iron rule of the Order of

the Knights of Jesus Christ,--one of those schemes in which the

crusading spirit and a hunger for new territory are subtly blended in

the common fashion of the Age of the Adventurers. It was currently

believed that the Senegal River rose from a lake near the source of

the Nile, and would thus enable the Portuguese to join hands with the

Christian monarch of Abyssinia. A special indulgence was obtained from

the Pope for all who fought under the banner of the Order of Christ.

And so, blessed by the Church, a series of slave-raids began, which

were slowly pushed farther south till Cape Verd was reached, and the

great turn of the coast to the east began to puzzle the sea-captains.

Henry died in 1460, having added, as he believed, a vast territory to

the Portuguese Crown, called by the name of Guinea, which is Bilad

Ghana corrupted. That the future interests of its discoverer might be

properly cared for the new land was divided into parishes, whose

chaplains were bound to say one weekly mass for the Iffante's soul. By

the time of the death of Affonso V. in 1481 the Portuguese had passed

the Niger Delta, discovered the island of Fernando Po, and reached a

point two degrees south of the equator. In 1484 Diego Cam reached the

mouth of the Congo, and next year set up a marble pillar at Cape Cross

to mark his occupation. Another year and Bartolomeo Diaz touched at

Angra Pequena, pushed round the Cape, keeping far out to sea, to Algoa

Bay; and on returning discovered that Cabo Tormentoso which his king

christened Cabo da Boa Esperanza, the first earnest of the hope of the

new road to the Indies. Portugal had taken rank as the first of

seafaring powers, and, in Politian's words, stood forth as "the

trustee of a second world, holding in the hollow of her hand a vast

series of lands, ports, seas, and islands revealed by the industry of

her sons and the enterprise of her kings." Politian asked that the

great story might be written while the materials were yet fresh, but

unfortunately Portugal was richer at that time in sea-captains than in

men of letters.

On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama, the greatest of the world's sailors,

left Lisbon on the greatest of all voyages. The circumnavigation of

Africa was imposed upon the Archemenid Sataspes as a "penalty worse than

death," but to those adventurers death itself was an inconsiderable

accident. Five years before Columbus had made his first journey, an

enterprise not to be named in the same breath as da Gama's. On Christmas

day, having safely passed the Cape, he came to a land of green,

tree-clad shores, which he piously christened Natal. He pushed on past

the Limpopo and the Zambesi delta to Mozambique, where he found an Arab

colony, and to Mombasa, where the chief street still bears his name. He

reached Calicut safely on May 20, 1498, ten months and twelve days after

leaving Lisbon; and two years later he returned home with one-third of

the crew he had sailed with. The Grand Road was now defined; thenceforth

it was a trade-route to which commerce naturally turned. No more

romantic voyages were ever undertaken, for in those forlorn latitudes

Christian and Muslim, East and West, met in war and peace, and creeds

and ideas clashed in the strangest disorder. In the expedition of 1500

under Pedro Alvarez Cabral two men were set ashore at Melinda, north of

Mozambique, to look for Prester John, and history is silent on the fate

of the unfortunate gentlemen. In da Gama's second voyage Nilwa was

captured and the Portuguese East African empire began. A fierce

enthusiast was this same da Gama, for, meeting with a great ship of the

Sultan of Egypt, filled with Muslim pilgrims, he looted it from stem to

stern, and sent every pilgrim to Paradise.

After da Gama came Affonso d'Albuquerque, who seized Goa, and

established his country's hold on the Malabar coast, and pushing on

captured Malacca, the richest of the Portuguese trading stations. He

swept all alien navies from the Eastern seas, and established on a

sound basis of naval supremacy a great commercial empire. Nothing less

than the conquest of Turkey would satisfy him. He dreamed of allying

himself with Prester John, and establishing himself on the Upper Nile;

and again of raiding Medina, carrying off Muhammad's coffin, and

exchanging it for the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. He captured Hormuz

on the Persian Gulf, and with it the enormous trade between India and

Asia Minor; and he was on the eve of leading an expedition against

Aden, which he saw to be the key of the Red Sea, when he was struck

down at Goa, and died, like the great seigneur he was, clothed in the

robes of his knightly order. Against his expressed wish he was buried

at Goa, for the Portuguese believed that, as long as the bones of

their intrepid leader lay there, their Empire of the East would stand.

So died the foremost of his countrymen, one who may rank with Olive as

the greatest of Christian viceroys.

Meantime the East African power had been fully established. Sofala and

Mozambique, the chief cities of the coast, had fallen to the

Portuguese, and their eyes turned to what they believed to be the

fabulously rich hinterlands, where Solomon had won his gold and ivory,

and Arab traders had for centuries found their hunting-ground. The

Monomotapa, the chief or emperor of the Makalanga, whose Zimbabwe was

situated somewhere in what we now know as Mashonaland, took the place

of Prester John in their imagination. They pushed up the Zambesi,

founding trading stations on the way, which still survive. They found

Ophir in every Bantu name, and began that long series of meaningless

wars of conquest which in the end shattered their dream of empire.

Gold-seeking has never been an enterprise blessed of Heaven; and the

Portuguese were more unlucky than most adventurers. They found

themselves involved in desperate wars; fever and poison carried off

their leaders; and the grandees, like Barreto and Homem, who in

cuirasses and velvets held indabas with Makalanga chiefs, got little

reward for their diplomacy. Soon the horizon narrowed, boundaries were

defined, and the colonist sat down in the coast towns to make a living

by legitimate trade.

The chief commercial importance of South-East Africa to the Portuguese

was as a port of call on the great trade-route to the Indies. The

skins, ivory, and gold, which the country produced, could never vie

with the organised exports of Goa and Calicut. So Mozambique and

Sofala became rather depots than supply-grounds, at which the great

ships anchored and refitted; points of vantage, too, in the endless

bickerings with Arab traders. There was a modest commerce with the

interior, with Tete as the chief depot, and Masapa, Luanze, and Bukoto

as the up-country stations. Each inland Portuguese trader was also a

diplomat. Through him the presents passed from the Portuguese king to

the savage "emperors," and, situated as he might be at Masapa, on the

very edge of the mountain Fura and the forbidden Makalanga country,

his duties were often most delicate and hazardous. The trade as a

whole was neither productive nor well managed. The whole empire was

undermanned. Portugal was colonising Brazil and West Africa at the

time she was sending out her adventurers to the East, and the little

kingdom in Europe could not long endure the strain. The sons she sent

forth rarely returned; and the estates at home fell out of cultivation

for lack of men. Meantime stronger and more fortunate races were

appearing in the Eastern waters. The Englishmen Newbery, Candish, and

Raymond began the rivalry, and the formidable Dutch followed next,

with their northern vigour and commercial aptitudes. In 1595 the first

of Linschoten's books was published, and opened up a new world for

Dutch enterprise. The Dutch East India Company soon wrested from

Portugal her Indian possessions, and in a little her East African

ports were mere isolated stations, much harassed by the Netherland

fleets, and the Grand Road had become a thing of the past.

But, as commerce declined, a new epoch in the Portuguese history

began. The disappearance of trade was followed by the advent of one of

the most heroic missionary brotherhoods in history. The Jesuit

Gonsalvo de Silveira was the pioneer, and a year after he landed in

Africa he was murdered by the Makalanga chief. Some fifty years later

the Dominicans joined the Jesuits, and till the beginning of the

eighteenth century laboured at their quixotic task. Now and then a

chief's son was baptised and attained to some degree of civilisation,

but the mass of the people, living among fierce tribal wars, cared

little for curious tales of peace. There was no ostentation with those

Bishops of This or That _in partibus infidelium_. No churches remain

to tell of their work. They lived simply in huts, and died a thousand

miles away from their kin, so that their very names are forgotten. In

our own day travellers in the Zambesi valley have come to kraals where

the people called themselves Christians, and showed a few perverted

rites in evidence, the one relic of those forgotten heroes. A few

incidents, however, have remained in men's minds. Luiz do Espirito

Santa, a prior of Mozambique, on being taken into the presence of the

Monomotapa and ordered to make obeisance, stiffened his back, and

replied that he did such homage to God alone; for which noble saying

he was duly murdered. The Shining Cross, which Constantine saw,

appeared also to the friar Manoel Sardinha when he led his forces

against the Makalanga. In 1652 the Monomotapa Manuza was received into

the Church, an event which was the occasion for a great thanksgiving

service at Lisbon, at which the king Joao IV. attended in state. His

son, Miguel, entered the Dominican order, was given the diploma of

Master of Theology, and died a vicar of the convent of Santa Barbara

in Goa. This barbarian Charles V., the greatest South African chief of

his time, may well be remembered among the few mortals who have

voluntarily renounced a crown.

And so the empire, having shipwrecked on a dream of gold and a land

where men could not live,[6] dwindled down to isolated forts and

stations, and the strenuous creed of the pioneers was softened into

the bastard contentment of the disheartened. Miserably and corruptly

governed, forgotten by Europe, they forgot Europe in turn, and a

strange somnolent life began of half-barbaric, wholly oriental

seigneurs, ruling as petty monarchs over natives from whom they were

not wholly distinct.[7] Instead of holding the outposts of European

culture, they sank themselves into the ways of the soil which their

forefathers had conquered. Round Tete and Inhambane and Sofala there

grew up great country estates, held on a kind of feudal tenure, where

the slack-mouthed grandee idled away his days. Set among acres of

orchards and gardens, those dwellings were often noble and sumptuous.

Thither came belated travellers, gold-seekers, shipwrecked seamen,

wandering friars, men of every nationality and trade, and in the prazo

of a de Mattos or a de Mira found something better than the mealie-pap

they had been living on in native kraals. Sitting on soft couches,

drinking good Madeira, and looking at a copy of a Murillo or a

Velasquez on the walls, they may well have extolled those oases in the

desert. The grandee had his harem, like any Arab sheikh; he dispensed

death cruelly and casually among his subjects; but as a rule he seems

to have had the virtue of hospitality, and welcomed gladly any

traveller with tales of the forgotten world. Fierce Bantu wars have

left few traces of those pleasant demesnes; but to the new-comer the

land where they once existed has still a quaint air of decadent

civilisation. Coming down from the high tableland of the interior,

which is the most strenuous land on earth, through the mountain glens

which, but for vegetation, might be Norway, one enters a country of

bush and full muddy rivers, a country of dull lifeless green and a

pestilent climate. But as one draws nearer the coast, where glimpses

of gardens appear and white-walled estancias, and rivers spread into

lagoons with spits of yellow sand and Arab boatmen, and, last of all,

the pale blue Indian Ocean stretches its sleepy leagues to the

horizon, there comes a new feeling into the scene, as of something

old, not new, decaying rather than undeveloped, which, joined with the

moist heat, makes the place

"A land

In which it seemed always afternoon,

All round the coast the languid air did swoon,

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream."

The tale of this empire, crude and melancholy as it is, provides an

instructive commentary on current theories of colonisation. From Tyre

and Sidon down to the last Teutonic performance, there is surely

sufficient basis to generalise on; but no two theorists are agreed

upon the laws which govern those racial adventures. The only approach

to a dogma is the theory that to colonise is to decentralise--that

before a vigorous life can begin over-sea the runners must be cut

which bind the colony to the homeland. France fails, we say, because a

Frenchman away from home cannot keep his mind off the boulevards; he

is for ever an exile, not a settler. Britain succeeds because her sons

find a land of their adoption. But the converse is equally important,

though too rare in its application to be often remembered. No race can

colonise which cannot decentralise its energy; but equally no race can

colonise which can wholly decentralise its sentiment and memory.

Portugal failed for this reason chiefly, that the Portuguese forgot

Portugal. Few peoples have been so adaptable. The white man's pride

died in their hearts. They were ready to mix with natives on equal

terms.[8] Now concubinage is bad, but legitimate marriage with

half-castes is infinitely worse for the _morale_ of a people. And

since Nature to the end of time has a care of races but not of

hybrids, this tolerant, foolish, unstable folk dropped out of the

battle-line of life, and sank from conquerors to resident aliens,

while their country passed from an empire to a vague seaboard. "A

people scattered by their wars and affairs over the whole earth, and

home-sick to a man," wrote Emerson of the English, and it is the trait

of the true colonist. It is as important to remember "sweet Argos" as

it is to avoid a womanish _heimweh_. For a colony is a sapling, bound

by the law of nature to follow the development of the parent tree. A

parcel of Englishmen on the Australian coast have no significance

without England at their back, to give them a tradition of manners and

government, to be their recruiting-ground, to hold out at once a

memory of home and an ideal of polity. Wars of separation may come,

but a colony is still a colony: it may have a different colour on the

map, but its moral complexion is the same; politically it may be a

rival, spiritually it remains a daughter.

The country, too, was wretchedly governed. The Portuguese viceroy,

often some impoverished noble, was in the same position as the Roman

proconsul, and had to restore his fortunes at the expense of the

provincials. Local administration was farmed out to local magnates,

another part of the crazy decentralisation which led to catastrophe.

There is more in bad government than hardship for the private citizen.

It means the weakening of the intellectual and moral nerve of the race

which tolerates it. Sound government is not, as revolutionary

doctrinaires used to think, the outcome of the grace of God and a

flawless code of abstractions. It means a perpetual effort, a keen

sense of reality, a constant facing and adjusting of problems. And it

is one of the laws of life that this high faculty is inconsistent with

extreme luxury and ease. A great governor may be one-fourth voluptuary,

but he must be three-parts politician. "Je n'aime pas beaucoup les

femmes," was one of Napoleon's self-criticisms, "ni le jeu--enfin rien;

je suis tout a fait un etre politique." The thin strain of old-world

tradition was useless in men who were sheikhs, adventurers, grandees,

but never statesmen.

But the ultimate source of weakness was economic. The settlements

were unproductive in any real sense. The empire was a chain of forts

and depots, and on no side was the ruling power organically connected

with the soil. A colony should be built up of farmers and miners and

manufacturers, having for its basis the productive energy of the land.

To exploit is not to colonise, and on this side there is the most

urgent need for decentralisation. The Portuguese lost their European

culture, but they remained adventurers and aliens. Their traders

bargained for produce, but they never went to the root of the matter

and organised production. They had no ranches or plantations, only

their trading-booths. Like the Carthaginians, they carried their

commerce to the ends of the earth, and left the ends of the earth

radically unaffected by their presence. People repeat glibly that trade

follows the flag, and that commerce is the basis of empire. And in a

sense it is true, for an empire without commercial inter-relations and

a solid basis of material prosperity is a house built on the sand. But

if the maxim be taken in the sense that commerce is in itself a

sufficient imperial bond, it is the most fatal of heresies. The Dutch,

in their heyday, had an empire chiefly of forts and factories; and what

part has the Dutch empire played in the destinies of mankind? No race

or kingdom can endure which is not rooted in the soil, drawing

sustenance from natural forces, increasing by tillage and forestry,

pasturage and mining and manufacture, the aggregate of the world's

production. And the need is as much moral as economic. The trader pure

and simple--Tyrian, Greek, Venetian, Dutch, or Portuguese--is too

cosmopolitan and adventitious to be the staple of a strong race. He has

not the common local affections; he is not knit close enough to nature

in his toil. To wrest a living from the avarice of the earth is to form

character with the salt and iron of power in it. India, it is true, is

a partial exception; but India is a unique case of a long-settled

subject people ruled wisely by a race which has sufficient breadth and

vitality in its culture to spare time for the experiment. It is to

colonies, which must always form the major part of an empire, that the

maxim applies; for the former is a native power under tutelage, while

the latter is the expansion of the parent country beyond the seas. And

this expansion must be more than commercial. The colony must be founded

in the soil, its people with each generation becoming more indigenous,

and its wealth based on its own toil and enterprise; otherwise it is

but such a chain of factories as the Portuguese established, which the

proverbial whiff of grape-shot may scatter to-morrow.

[4] There is an English abbreviation of dos Santos in

Pinkerton's 'General Collection of Voyages and

Travels.' The original work was printed at Evora in

1609.

[5] The Portuguese geographers divided Central Africa into

Angola in the west, the kingdom of Prester John in the

north (Abyssinia), and the empire of Monomotapa

(Mashonaland) in the south. The real Prester John was a

Nestorian Christian in Central Asia, whose khanate was

destroyed by Genghis Khan about the end of the twelfth

century; but the name became a generic one for any

supposed Christian monarch in unknown countries.

[6] Purchas wrote, "Barreto was discomfited not by the Negro

but by the Ayre, the malignity whereof is the same sauce

of all their golden countries in Africa."

[7] One missionary wrote, "They have already lost the

knowledge of Christians and thrown away the obligations

of Faith" (Wilmot, 'Monomotapa,' p. 215).

[8] Among the Baronga, the Bantu tribe who live around Delagoa

Bay, there are some ancient folk-tales, derived from

Portuguese sources, in which the heroes have Portuguese

names, such as Joao, Boniface, Antonio. One tale about

the king's daughter, who was saved from witchcraft by

the courage of a young adventurer called Joao, is a form

of the story of Jack and the ugly Princess, which

appears throughout European folk-lore. Cf. M. Junod's

'Chants et Contes des Baronga,' pp. 274-322.

CHAPTER III.

THE GREAT TREK.

Every race has its Marathon into which the historian does not inquire

too closely who has a reverence for holy places and a fear of

sacrilege. It may be a battle or a crusade, a creed, or perhaps only a

poem, but whatever it is, it is part and parcel of the national life,

and it is impossible to reach the naked truth through the rose-coloured

mists of pious tradition. A Sempach or a Bannockburn cannot be

explained by a bare technical history. The spirit of a nation was in

arms, the national spirit was the conqueror, and the combatants appear

more than mere flesh and blood, walking "larger than human" on the

hills of story. This phenomenon has merits which it is hard to

exaggerate. It is the basis for the rhetorical self-confidence which is

essential to a strong race. It is a fountain from which generous youth

can draw inspiration, an old watchword to call the inert to battle. If

the race has a literature, it helps to determine its character; if the

race has none, it provides a basis for fireside tales. The feeblest

Greek at the court of Artaxerxes must have now and then straightened

himself when he remembered Salamis. Without such a retrospect a people

will live in a crude present, and, having no buttress from the past,

will fare badly from the rough winds of life.

To the Boer the Great Trek is the unrecorded but ever-remembered

Odyssey of his people. He has a long memory, perhaps because of his

very slowness and meagreness of fancy. His life was so monotonous that

the tale of how his fathers first came into the land inspired him by

its unlikeness to his own somnolent traditions. Besides, he had a

Scriptural parallel. The persecuted children of Israel, in spite of

the opposition of Pharaoh, had fled across the desert from Egypt and

found a Promised Land. The Boer sense of analogy is extremely vivid

and extremely inexact. Here he saw a perfect precedent. A God-fearing

people, leaving their homes doubtless at the call of the Most High,

had fled into the wilds of Amalek and Edom, conquered and dispossessed

the Canaanites, and occupied a land which, if not flowing with milk

and honey, was at least well grassed and plentifully watered. How keen

the sense of Scriptural example was, and how constantly present to the

Boer mind was the thought that he was following in the footsteps of

Israel, is shown by one curious story. The voortrekkers, pushing out

from Pretoria, struck a stream which flowed due north, the first large

north-running water they had met. Moreover, it was liable to droughts

and floods recurring at fixed seasons. What could it be but the great

river of Egypt? So with immense pious satisfaction they recognised it

as the Nile, and the Nyl it remains to this day.

The thought of a national exodus comes easily to the Aryan mind,--an

inheritance from primeval Asian wanderings. And in itself it is

something peculiarly bold and romantic, requiring a renunciation of

old ties and sentiments impossible to an over-domesticated race. It

requires courage of a high order and a confident faith in destiny.

Perhaps the courage needed in the case of the Great Trek was less

than in most similar undertakings, because of the cheering Scriptural

precedent and the lack of that imagination which can vividly forecast

the future. The past history of the Boer, too, prepared him for

desperate enterprises. Made up originally of doubtful adventurers from

Holland, hardihood grew up in their blood as they pushed northwards

from the seacoast. The people of the littoral might be, as Lady Anne

Barnard found them, sluggish and spiritless; but the farmers of

Colesberg and Graaff-Reinet were in the nature of things a different

breed. The true Dutch blood does not readily produce an adventurer,

but it was leavened and sublimated by a French Huguenot strain, scions

of good families exiled for the most heroic of causes. The coarse

strong Dutch stock swallowed them up; the language disappeared, the

Colberts became Grobelaars, the Villons Viljoens, the Pinards

Pienaars; but something remained of _elan_ and spiritual exaltation.

Harassed from the north by Griqua and Hottentot bandits, and from the

east by Kaffir incursions, they became a hardy border race, keeping

their own by dint of a strong arm. The quiet of the great sun-washed

spaces entered into their souls. They grew taciturn, ungraceful,

profoundly attached to certain sombre dogmas, impatient of argument or

restraint, bad citizens for any modern State, but not without a

gnarled magnificence of their own. They were out of line with the

whole world, far nearer in kinship to an Old Testament patriarch than

to the townsfolk with whom they shared the country. All angles and

corners, they presented an admirable front to savage nature; but they

were hard to dovetail into a complex modern society. They would have

made good Ironsides, and would have formed a stubborn left wing at

Armageddon, but they did ill with franchises and taxes and paternal

legislation.

I will take two savage tales from their history to show what manner of

men they were in extremity. A certain Frederick Bezuidenhout, a farmer

in the Bruintje Hoogte, and by all accounts a dabbler in less reputable

trades, was summoned on some charge before the landdrost of the

district, and declined to appear. A warrant was issued for his

apprehension, and a party of soldiers sent out to enforce it, whereupon

Bezuidenhout took refuge in a cave, and was shot dead in its defence.

The fiery cross went round among his relatives; overtures, which were

refused, were made to the Kaffir chiefs, and Jan Bezuidenhout, the

brother of the dead man, swore to fealty a band of as pretty outlaws as

ever dwelt on a border. The insurrection failed; thirty-nine of the

insurgents were captured, and five were hanged, and Jan Bezuidenhout

himself was shot in the Kaffir country by an advance party of the

pursuit. Such is the too famous story of Slachter's Nek. The tale of

Conrad de Buys[9] and his doings is wilder but more obscure. A man of

great physical strength and the worst character, he was the leader of

the sterner desperadoes on the Kaffir border. Through living much in

native kraals he had become little better than a savage. He was mixed

up in Van Jaarsveld's insurrection, and by-and-by his private crimes

exceeded his political by so much that he was compelled to flee into

the northern wilds. This first of the voortrekkers is next heard of on

the banks of the Limpopo, living in pure barbarism, with a harem of

Kaffir wives and an immense prestige among his neighbours. The emigrant

party under Potgieter, on their return from Delagoa Bay, found

somewhere in the Lydenburg hills two half-breeds who called this

ruffian father and acted as interpreters. Conrad peopled the Transvaal

with his children, whom he seems to have ruled in a patriarchal

fashion, forming a real Buys clan, who still hang together at Marah, in

Zoutpansberg. In the Pietersburg Burgher camp during the war there was

a Buys location, who strenuously urged their claim to be considered a

white people and burghers of the republic.

Such was one element in the race of border farmers--a substratum of

desperate lawlessness. But there were other elements, many of them

noble and worthy. Their morals were less bad than peculiar; their

lawlessness rather an inability to understand restrictions than an

impulse to disorder. They had their own staunch loyalties, their own

strict code of honour. They had the self-confidence of a people whose

dogmatic foundations are unshaken, and who are in habitual intercourse

with an inferior race. In a rude way they were kindly and hospitable.

They had a courage so unwavering that it may be called an instinct,

and the bodily strength which comes from bare living and constant

exertion. "Simple" and "pastoral" used to be words of praise. During

the late war they became a sneer; but it is well to recognise that

while they may comprise the gravest faults they must denote a few

sterling virtues.

When Pieter Retief left Graaff-Reinet in 1837, he issued an ingenious

proclamation which contains his justification of the Great Trek. He

complains of the unnecessary hardships attending the emancipation of

the slaves, the insecurity of life and property caused by the absence

of proper vagrancy laws, and the disaster certain to attend Lord

Glenelg's reversal of British policy on the Kaffir border. Retief was a

man of high and conscientious character, and his profession of faith is

valuable as showing the view of current politics held by the better

class of the voortrekkers. They did not defend slavery--Retief

expressly repudiates it; but they objected to the method of its

abolition, and the lack of precautions for future public safety which

the event demanded. Lord Glenelg's withdrawal from the eastern border

to the boundary of the Keiskama and Tyumie rivers, as fixed by Lord

Charles Somerset in 1819, appeared to them a flagrant piece of

weakness which sooner or later must make life on that border

impossible. They saw no hope of redress from the imperial Government,

which seemed to be dominated by philanthropic hysteria. It is a grave

indictment, and worth examination. The slavery question stands in the

foreground. The ocean slave-trade was suppressed in 1807, and the

English abolitionists had leisure to turn their minds to South Africa.

The first progressive enactment came in 1816, when the registration of

slaves and slave-births was made compulsory in every district. In 1823

a series of laws were passed restricting slave labour on the Sabbath,

giving slaves the right of owning property, and limiting the

punishments to which they were liable. In 1826 officials were

appointed in country districts to watch over slave interests, and see

that the protective enactments were carried out. The famous Fiftieth

Ordinance of 1828 gave the Hottentots the same legal rights as the

white colonists. Meanwhile for years a great missionary agitation for

total abolition had been going on, which was powerfully supported by

the Whig party in England. The Dutch saw clearly the trend of events,

and, in what is known as the "Graaff-Reinet proposals," attempted to

procure gradually the emancipation which they realised was bound to

come. They proposed, unanimously, that after a date to be fixed by

Government all female children should be free at birth, and, by a

majority, that all male children born after the same date should also

be free. I cannot find in these proposals the insidious attempt to

defeat the movement which some writers have discerned: they seem to

me to be as fair and reasonable an offer as we could expect a

slave-holding class to make. But the British attitude is also

perfectly clear. Slave-holding had been condemned as a crime by the

national conscience, and there could be no temporising with the evil

thing. Here, again, a certain kind of education was necessary to

appreciate the point of view. The farmers of Graaff-Reinet had not

listened to the harangues of Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton; Zion

Chapel and its all-pervading atmosphere of mild brotherly love were

not within the compass of their experience. England was right, as she

generally is in policies which are inspired by a profound popular

conviction; but she could hardly expect men of a very different

training to fall in readily with her views. In any case the working

out of the policy was attended by many blunders. The Emancipation Act

took effect in Cape Colony from the 1st of December 1834. L1,200,000

seems a rather inadequate compensation for 35,000 slaves, and as each

claim had to be presented before commissioners in London, the farmer

had perforce to employ an agent, who bought up his claims at a

discount of anything from 18 to 30 per cent.

The losses from emancipation were chiefly felt in the rich agricultural

districts of the colony, such as Stellenbosch, Ceres, and Worcester; the

border farmers were not a large slave-owning class, and the lack of

cheap labour did not trouble them. But emancipation meant a general

dislocation of credit all over the country. A man who in 1833 was

counted a rich man was comparatively poor in 1835, and this _peripeteia_

had a bad effect on the whole farming class. It was rather the spirit of

the Act which the Boers of Graaff-Reinet complained of,--the theory, to

them ridiculous, that the black man could have legal rights comparable

with the white, and the sense of insecurity which dwellers under such a

_regime_ must feel. The average Boer was an arbitrary but not an unkind

slave-master; he regarded his slaves as part of his _familia_, an

enclosure to which the common law should not penetrate. To be limited by

statute in the use of what he considered his chattels, to find hundreds

of officious gentlemen ready to take the part of the chattels on any

occasion against him, were pills too bitter to swallow. Emancipation

produced vagrants, and he asked for a stringent vagrancy law which his

landrosts could administer. England, refusing naturally to take away

with one hand what she had given with the other, declined to expose the

emancipated slave to the arbitrariness of local tribunals. Well, argued

the farmers, our slaves, being free, have become rogues and vagabonds;

they may plunder us at their pleasure and England will take their part:

it is time for us to seek easier latitudes.

But the chief factor in Dutch dissatisfaction was undoubtedly Lord

Glenelg's limitation of the eastern border line. There is something to

be said for the view of that discredited, and, to tell the truth, not

very wise statesman. The Boer was a bad neighbour for a Kaffir people.

He was always encroaching, spurred on by that nomadic something in

his blood--a true Campbell of Breadalbane, who built his house on the

limits of his estate that he might "brise yont." A buffer state was

apt to become very soon a Boer territory. Better to try and establish

a strong Kaffir people, who might attain to some semblance of national

life, and under the maternal eye of Britain become useful and

progressive citizens. So reasoned Lord Glenelg and his advisers,

missionary and official. Unfortunately facts were against him, the

chimera of a Kaffir nation was soon dispelled, and ten years later Sir

Harry Smith, a governor who did not suffer from illusions, made the

eastern province a Kaffir reserve under a British commissioner. The

frontier Boer, however, was not in a position to share any sentiment

about a Kaffir nation. He saw his cattle looted, his family compelled

to leave their newly acquired farm, and a long prospect of Kaffir

raids where the presumption of guilt would always be held to lie

against his own worthy self. Above all things he saw a barred door. No

more "brising yont" for him on the eastern border. Expansion, space,

were as the breath of his nostrils, and if he could not have them in

the old colony he would seek them in the untravelled northern wilds.

There were thus certain well-defined reasons for the Great Trek in

contemporary politics which, combined with distorted memories like

Slachter's Nek, made up in Boer eyes a very complete indictment

against Pharaoh and his counsellors. But the real reason lay in his

blood. Had the British Government been all that he could desire, he

would still have gone. He was a wanderer from his birth, and trekking,

even for great distances, was an incident of his common life. A

pastoral people have few vested interests in land. There are no

ancient homesteads to leave, or carefully-tended gardens or rich

corn-lands. Their wealth is in their herds, which can be driven at

will to other pastures. The Boer rarely built much of a farm, and he

never fenced. A cottage, a small vegetable-yard, and a stable made up

the homestead on even large farms on the border. There was nothing to

leave when he had gathered his horned cattle into a mob, yoked his

best team to his waggon, and stowed his rude furniture inside. With

his rifle slung on his shoulder, he was as free to take the road as

any gipsy. He was leaving the country of the alien, where mad fancies

held sway and unjust laws and taxes oppressed him. He was bound for

the far lands of travellers' tales, the country of rich grass and

endless game, where he could live as he pleased and preserve the

fashions of his fathers unchanged. He would meet with fierce tribes,

but his elephant-gun, as he knew from experience, was a match for many

assegais. There was much heroism in the Great Trek, but there was also

for the young and hale an exhilarating element of sport. To them it

was a new, strange, and audacious adventure. No predikant accompanied

the emigrants. The Kirk did not see the Scriptural parallel, and to a

man preferred the treasure in Egypt to the doubtful fortunes of

Israel.

The first party consisted of about thirty waggons, under the

leadership of Louis Trichard and Jan van Rensburg. They travelled

slowly, the men hunting along the route, and outspanned for days, and

even weeks, at pleasant watering-places. The main object of those

pioneers was to ascertain the road to Delagoa Bay; so they did not

seek land for settlement, but pushed on till they came to Piet

Potgieter's Rust, a hundred miles or so north of Pretoria, which they

thought to be about the proper latitude. Here the party divided. Van

Rensburg and his men went due east into the wild Lydenburg country on

their way to the coast, and were never heard of again. Trichard waited

a little, and then slowly groped his way through the Drakensberg to

Portuguese territory. The band suffered terribly from fever; their

herds were annihilated by the tsetse fly, of which they now heard for

the first time; but in the end about twenty-six survivors struggled

down to the bay and took ship for Natal. So ended the adventure of the

path-finders. The next expedition was led by the famous Andries

Potgieter, and came from the Tarka and Colesberg districts. The little

Paulus Kruger, a boy of ten, travelled with the waggons to the country

which he was to rule for long. Potgieter settled first in the

neighbourhood of Thaba 'Nchu on the Basuto border, and bought a large

tract of land from a Bataung chief. Farms were marked out, and a few

emigrants remained, but the majority pushed on to the north and east.

Some crossed the Vaal, and finding a full clear stream coming down

from the north, christened it the Mooi or Fair River; and here in

after-days, faithful to their first impression, they planted the old

capital of the Transvaal. Potgieter with a small band set off on the

search for Delagoa Bay, but he seems to have lost himself in the

mountains between Lydenburg and Zoutpansberg. On his return he found

that Mosilikatse's warriors had at last given notice of their

presence, and had massacred a number of small outlying settlements. So

began one of the sternest struggles in South African history.

Potgieter gathered all the survivors into a great laager at a place

called Vechtkop, between the Rhenoster and Wilge rivers. The

precaution was taken none too soon, for one morning a few days later

a huge native army appeared, led by the chief induna of Mosilikatse.

The odds, so far as can be gathered, were about a hundred to one, but

the little band was undaunted, and Sarel Celliers, a true Cromwellian

devotee of the Bible and the sword, called his men to prayer. Then

forty farmers rode out from the laager, galloped within range, spread

out and fired a volley, riding back swiftly to reload. They did good

execution, but forty men, however bold, cannot disperse 5000, and in a

little the Matabele were round the laager, and the siege began. The

defence was so vigorous that after heavy losses the enemy withdrew,

driving with them the little stock which formed the sole wealth of the

emigrants.

The glove had been thrown down and there could be no retreat. Midian

must be destroyed root and branch before Israel could possess the

land. After a short rest Potgieter and Gerrit Maritz began the war of

reprisals. With a commando of over 100 men and a few Griqua followers,

they forded the Vaal, crossed the Magaliesberg, and arrived at

Mosilikatse's chief kraal at Mosega. The farmers' victory was

complete. Over 400 of the Matabele were slain, several thousand head

of cattle secured, and the kraal given to the flames. Potgieter

returned to found the little town of Winburg in memory of his victory,

and, with the assistance of Pieter Retief, to frame a constitution for

the nascent state. But Mosilikatse still remained. He had not been

present at the _debacle_ of Mosega, and while he remained on the

frontier there was no security for life and property. New recruits had

come up from the south, including the redoubtable family of Uys, the

horses were in good condition, all had had a breathing-space; so a new

and more formidable expedition started in search of the enemy. They

found him on the Marico, and for nine days fought with him on the old

plan of a charge, a volley, and a retreat. Then one morning there was

no enemy to fight; a cloud of dust to the north showed the line of his

flight; Mosilikatse had retired across the Limpopo. Whereupon the

emigrants proclaimed the whole of the late Matabele territory--the

Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, and a portion of Bechuanaland--as

theirs by the right of conquest.

So runs the tale of the Great Trek,--rather an Iliad than an Odyssey,

perhaps, and a very bloodthirsty Iliad, too. To most men it must seem

a noble and spirited story. Whatever the justice of the emigrants'

grievances, they conducted themselves well in their self-imposed

exile. Potgieter and his men were indeed rather exceptional specimens

of their race, and they were strung to the highest pitch by Christian

faith and the unchristian passion of revenge. They relapsed, when all

was over, to a somewhat ordinary type of farmer, which seems to bear

out the general conception of the Boer character--that, while it is

capable of high deeds, it is powerful by sudden effort rather than by

sustained and strenuous toil. The experiment which began so well

should have ended in something better than two bourgeois republics.

There are some who see in the tale nothing more than an unwarranted

invasion of native territory, and a cruel massacre of a brave race. No

view could be more unjust. The Matabele had not a scrap of title to

the country, and had not dwelt in it more than a few years. The real

owners, if you can talk of ownership at all, were the unfortunate

Bataungs and Barolongs, whom the emigrants befriended. The Matabele

were indeed as murderous a race of savages as ever lived, and their

defeat was a moral as well as a political necessity. It is well to

protect the aborigine, but when he is armed with a dozen assegais and

earnestly desires your blood, it is safer to shoot him or drive him

farther afield. That the Boers were guilty of atrocities in those

fierce wars is undoubted, and, if some tales be true, unpardonable.

But there are excuses to be made. When a man has seen his child

writhing on a spear and his wife mutilated; when he reflects that he

stands alone against impossible odds, and has a keen sense, too, of

Scriptural parallels,--he may be forgiven if he slays and spares not,

and even gives way to curious cruelties. Revenge and despair may play

odd pranks with the best men: _tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner_.

What, then, is the proper view to take of this footnote to the world's

history, this Marathon of an unimaginative race? It is possible to see

in it only an attempt of a half-savage people to find elbow-room for

their misdeeds. The voortrekkers, it has been said, fled the approach

of a mild and enlightened modern policy, invaded a land which was not

theirs, slaughtered a people who had every right to resist them, and

created for themselves space to practise their tyranny over the

native, and perpetuate their exploded religious and political creed in

a retrograde society. It is easy to say this, as it is easy to explain

the doings of the Pilgrim Fathers as a flight from a too liberal and

tolerant land to wilds where intolerance could rule unchecked. With

the best will in the world to scrutinise Dutch legends, the Great Trek

seems to me just that legend which can well support any scrutiny. For

it was first and foremost a conflict between civilisations. There were

strong and worthy men among the voortrekkers, as there were estimable

people among their opponents. The modern political creed, based on

English constitutionalism, stray doctrines of the French Revolution,

and certain economic maxims from Bentham and Adam Smith, is, in spite

of minor differences, common to the civilised world. This was the

creed which was forced upon the Border Dutch, and, having received no

education in the axioms on which it was based, they unhesitatingly

rejected it, and clung to their old Scriptural feudalism. When two

creeds come into conflict, the older and weaker usually goes under.

But in this case the men on the losing side were of a peculiar temper

and dwelt in a peculiar country. They took the bold path of carrying

themselves and their creed to a new land, and so extended its lease of

life for the better part of a century. Let us take the parallel of the

American Civil War. The North fought for the cause of the larger civic

organism and certain social reforms which were accidentally linked to

it. The South stood for the principle of nationality, and for certain

traditions of their own particular nationality. Roughly speaking, it

was the same conflict; but the Southern creed perished because there

was no practicable hinterland to which it could be transplanted. Had

there been, I do not think its most stubborn opponents would have

denied admiration to so bold an endeavour to preserve a national

faith.

The Great Trek set its seal upon the new countries. The Orange River

Colony and the Transvaal are still in the rural places an emigrant's

land. The farmhouse is the unit; the country dorps are merely jumbles

of little shanties to supply the farmers' wants. The place-names, with

the endless recurrence of simple descriptive epithets like Sterkstroom

or Klipfontein, or expressions of feeling like Nooitgedacht or

Welgevonden, still tell the tale of the first discoverers. There is

no obscurity in the nomenclature, such as is found in an old land

where history has had time to be forgotten. Any farm-boy will tell you

how this river came to be named the Ox-Yoke or that hill the Place of

Weeping. It has made the people a solemn, ungenial folk, calculating

and thrifty in their ways, and given to living in hovels which suggest

that here they have no continuing city. Perhaps, as has been said, no

performance, however stupendous, is worth loss of geniality; and the

finer graces of life have never had a chance on the veld. There is

gipsy blood in their veins, undying vagabondage behind all their

sleepy contentment. The quiet of the old waggon journeys, when men

counted the days on a notched stick that they might not miss the still

deeper quiet of the Sabbaths, has gone into the soul of a race which

still above all things desires space and leisure. It is this gipsy

endowment which made them born warriors after a fashion; it is this

which gives them that apathy in the face of war losses which

discomfits their sentimental partisans. Britain in her day has won

many strange peoples to her Empire; but none, I think, more curious or

more hopeful than the stubborn children of Uys and Potgieter.

[9] In Lichtenstein's 'Travels in South Africa' (1803-6)

there is an interesting and comparatively favourable

account of Buys in his Cape Colony days.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BOER IN SPORT.

It is a fair working rule of life that the behaviour of a man in his

sports is a good index to his character in graver matters. With

certain reservations the same holds true of a people. For on the

lowest interpretation of the word "sport," the high qualities of

courage, honour, and self-control are part of the essential equipment,

and the mode in which such qualities appear is a reflex of the

idiosyncrasies of national character. But this is true mainly of the

old settled peoples, whose sports have long lost the grim reality in

which they started. To a race which wages daily war with savage nature

the refinements of conduct are unintelligible; sport becomes business;

and unless there is a hereditary tradition in the matter the fine

manners of the true hunter's craft are notable by their absence.

It is worth while considering the Boer in sport, for it is there he is

seen at his worst. Without tradition of fair play, soured and harassed

by want and disaster, his sport became a matter of commerce, and he

held no device unworthy in the game. He hunted for the pot, and the

pot cast its shadow over all his doings. His arms were rarely in the

old days weapons of precision, and we can scarcely expect much

etiquette in the pursuit of elephant or lion in a bush country with a

smooth-bore gun which had a quaint trajectory and a propensity to

burst. The barbarous ways which he learned in those wild games he

naturally carried into easier sports. Let us admit, too, that the Boer

race has produced a few daring and indefatigable hunters, who, though

rarely of the class of a Selous or a Hartley, were yet in every way

worthy of the name of sportsmen. I have talked with old Boers from the

hunting-veld, and in their tales of their lost youth there was a

fervour which the commercial results of their expeditions did not

explain. But the fact remains that to an Englishman the Boers, with a

few exceptions, are not a sporting race--they are not even a race of

very skilful hunters. They came to the land when game was abundant and

they thinned it out; but the manner of this thinning was as prosaic as

the routine of their daily lives.

One advantage the Boer possessed in common with all dwellers in new

lands--he was familiar from childhood with gun and saddle, and had to

face the world on his own legs from his early boyhood. In this way he

acquired what one might call the psychological equipment of the

hunter. Any one who has hunted in wild countries will remember the

first sense of strangeness, the feeling that civilisation had got too

far away for comfort, which is far more eerie than common nervousness.

To this feeling the Boer was an utter stranger. It was as natural for

him to set a trap for a lion before returning at nightfall, or to go

off to the hunting-veld for four winter months, as it was to sow in

spring and reap in autumn. And because it was an incident of his

common life he imported into it a ridiculous degree of domesticity. On

his farm he shot for the pot; on his winter treks with stock to the

bush-veld and the wilder hunting expeditions for skins and horns he

carried his wife and family in his buck-waggon, built himself a hut

in the wilds, and reproduced exactly the life of the farm. It was easy

to reproduce anywhere, for it was simplicity itself. Mealie-meal,

coffee, and some coarse tobacco were his supplies, and fresh meat when

game fell to his gun. So it is not to be wondered at if hunting became

to him something wholly destitute of romance and adventure, an affair

like kirk and market, where business was the beginning and the end.

But besides the Boer who farmed first and hunted afterwards, there was

the Boer who hunted by profession. The class is almost extinct, but in

outlying farms one may still meet the old hunter and listen to his

incredible tales. Some were men of the first calibre, the pioneers of

a dozen districts, men of profound gravity and placid temper, who

rarely told the tale of their deeds. But the common hunter is above

all things a talker. Like the Kaffir, he brags incessantly, and a

little flattery will lead him into wild depths. He lies to the

stranger, because he cannot be contradicted; he lies to his friends,

because they are connoisseurs in the art and can appreciate the work

of a master. Boer hunting tales, therefore, should be received with

extreme caution. They would often puzzle an expert lawyer, for they

are full of minute and fallacious particulars, skilfully put together,

and forming as a rule a narrative of single-hearted heroism. I have

listened to a Boer version of a lion-hunt, and I have heard the facts

from other members of the same party; and the contrast was a lesson in

the finer arts of embroidery. But this society had its compensations.

Those men live on the outer fringe of Boerdom; they have no part in

politics and few ties to the civilised society of Pretoria; and the

result is that race hatred and memory of old strifes have always had

a smaller place in their hearts. Without the virtues of their

countryman, they are often free from his more unsocial failings.

It is as a big-game hunter that he has acquired his reputation, and by

big game he meant the lion and the elephant, animals which he had to

go farther afield and run greater risks to secure. The old race of

elephant-hunters were a strong breed, men in whom courage from long

experience had become a habit; and certainly they had need of it with

their long-stocked cumbrous flint-locks, which might put out a man's

shoulder in the recoil. They knew their business and took no needless

risks, for elephant-hunting is a thing which can be learned. Save in

thick bush, there is little real danger; and if the hunter awaits a

charging elephant, a point-blank shot at a few yards will generally

make the animal swerve. Mr Selous, whose authority is beyond question,

has drawn these men as they appeared to him in Mashonaland--skilful

shikarris, but jealous, uncompanionable, often treacherous as we count

honour in sport; and Oswell's story is the same. The lion, which, in

spite of tales to the contrary, remains one of the two most dangerous

quarries in the world, was a different affair to them. There was

little commercial profit from shooting him, and they had no other

motive to face danger. Nor can we blame them, for a charging lion to a

man with an uncertain gun means almost as sure destruction as a

shipwreck in mid-ocean. The Boer hunter shot him for protection,

rarely for sport. Very few of the lions killed on the high veld fell

to rifles; a trap-gun set near a drinking-place was the ordinary way

of dealing with them. Mr Ericsen, the most famous of Kalahari

pioneers, who brought many herds of Ovampa and Damara cattle across

the desert, used to tell this story of Boer prowess in lion-hunting.

He was travelling with a party of Boer hunters, and one night a lion

killed one of the oxen. The men were in a fury, and urged Mr Ericsen

to follow, bragging that each of them was prepared to tackle the beast

single-handed. Mr Ericsen said that he was no hunter, but promised to

let them have his dogs and natives to follow up the spoor in the

morning. But when the morning came the party had silently dispersed,

mortally afraid lest they should be expected to fulfil their promises.

In the long list of South African big-game hunters the names are

mostly English,--Gordon-Cumming, Byles, Hartley, Oswell, Sharpe,

Selous, Francis, John Macdonald,--and the reason does not wholly lie

in the inability and disinclination of the Boer to bring his deeds

from the rhetoric of talk to the calmer record of print.

At other four-footed game, from the buffalo to the duiker, the Boer

was generally a fair shot, in some cases a good shot, but very rarely

a great shot. Reputation in marksmanship was very much a matter of

accident. A happy fluke with them, as with natives, might make a

reputation for life, though the man in question shot badly ever

afterwards. The number of Boer marksmen of the first rank could be

counted on the ten fingers. On the other hand, the nature of their

life produced a very high average. The Boer boy shot from the day he

could hold a rifle, and there were few utter failures among them. To

be sure, it was not pretty shooting. His first business was to get the

game, and if he could do it by sitting on a tree near the stream and

killing at twenty yards, he did it gladly. When he went hunting he

reflected that his cartridges cost him 3d. apiece, and were all that

stood between him and starvation; so very naturally he became as poky

a shot as the English gamekeeper who is sent out to kill for the

table. If a hunter took out 500 cartridges and brought back 120 head

of game, he was reckoned a good man at his work. To this, of course,

there were exceptions, such as old Jan Ludig, who once in Waterberg

shot five gnu (who travel in Indian file) within seven miles. The name

of Mr Van Rooyen, too, familiar to all Matabele hunters, shows what

the Dutch race can produce in the way of marksmanship and veld-craft.

In one branch of the chase they were consummate masters. The Boer

method of stalking is an art by itself, for it is really a kind of

driving, by showing oneself at strategic points till the game is

forced into suitable ground. In open country they also followed with

great success the method of riding down. Mounted on a good shooting

pony, the hunter galloped alongside a herd till he was within

reasonable distance; then in a trice he was on the ground, had

selected his animal, and fired--all within a few seconds. This was a

risky game for a large party, owing to the very rude etiquette which

prevailed on the subject of shooting in your neighbour's direction;

and I have heard of many seriously wounded and even killed by their

companions' shots. Still another way was to ride alongside an animal

and shoot him from the saddle at a few paces' distance. This was

called "brandt" or "burning," and required a firm seat and a very

steady eye.

Birds were thought little of, except by some of the more advanced

farmers and by sportsmen from the towns. The country is full of many

excellent sporting birds: guineafowl, quail, francolin, duck, geese,

and several kinds of partridge and bustard; but though a few farmers

shot wildfowl on their dams, the average Boer was a poor shot with a

gun, and when he did use one he liked to take his birds sitting. A

hunter might kill a bird neatly with a rifle, which he would miss at

shorter range with a shot-gun. This fashion is quickly passing. Many

farmers possess excellent guns of the latest pattern; and I have known

Boers who could hold their own with credit in Norfolk or Perthshire.

As shooting is becoming more of a sport and less of a business,

etiquette is growing up; and the Boer is learning to spare does and

ewes and take pleasure in hard shots, where his father would have

slaughtered casually and walked long and far to spare his cartridges.

The new order is bringing better manners, but nothing can restore the

noble herds of game which fell unlamented and unnoted under the old

_regime_.

Other sports were scarcely considered. He rarely fished, leaving the

catching of yellow-fish, tiger-fish, and barbel to the Kaffirs; and

when he did, his rod and tackle were neolithic in their simplicity. I

have never seen a Boer rod which had any of the proper attributes of a

rod, and he used to profess scorn for a man with a greenheart or a

split-cane as for one who would stipulate for an elegant spade before

digging potatoes. Sometimes in a village or among neighbouring farmers

flat-races would be got up; but the Boer pony was bred more for

endurance than for speed, and a small selling-plate meeting was about

the limit of his horse-racing. I have never seen or heard of a Boer

steeplechase. On the other hand, he had a wonderful skill, as our army

discovered, in riding at full speed over a breakneck country,--a skill

due, perhaps, more to veld-craft than to horsemanship. Hunting big

game on horseback taught him, as part of the business, to leave much

to his horse; and his horse rarely played him false. Whether he was

clattering down a stony hillside, or dodging through thick scrub, or

racing over veld honeycombed with ant-bear holes, he rode with a loose

rein and full confidence in his animal. It is difficult to frame an

opinion on his horsemanship. His long stirrups, the easy "tripple" of

his horse, and his loose seat make him a type of horseman very

different to our cavalryman or Leicestershire master of hounds. But,

loose as he sits, he can stick on over most kinds of country, and he

is a natural horsemaster of the first order. A Boer knows by instinct

how to manage his horse: he never frets him; he rarely ill-treats him;

and he can judge to a mile the limits of his endurance.

As a sportsman, then, the Boer is scarcely at his best. He has shown

himself dull, sluggish, unimaginative, capable of both skill and

endurance, but a niggard in the exercise of either, unless compelled by

hunger or hope of gain. Unlike most races, it is in his sports that he

shows his most unlovely traits, and that flat incomprehensible side of

his character which has puzzled an ornamental world. The truth is that

he is, speaking broadly, without imagination and that dash of adventure

which belongs to all imaginative men. The noble spurs of the

Drakensberg rose within sight of his home; but he would as soon have

thought of climbing a peak for the sport or the scenery as of dabbling

in water-colours. A dawn was to him only the beginning of the day, a

mellow veld sunset merely a sign to outspan; and I should be afraid to

guess his thoughts on a primrose by the river's brim, or whatever is

the South African equivalent. His religion made him credulous, but his

temperament transformed the most stupendous of the world's histories

into a kind of Farmer's Almanac, and Eastern poetry became for him a

literal record of fact. A friend of mine, travelling with a Boer hunter

in the far north, called his attention to the beauty of the starry

night, and, thinking to interest his companion, told him a few simple

astronomical truths. The Boer angrily asked him why he lied so

foolishly. "Do not I read in the Book," he said, "that the world stands

on four pillars?" And when my friend inquired about the foundation of

the pillars, the Boer sulked for two days. But there is one trait which

he shared with all true sportsmen, a love of wild animals. To be sure,

the finest reserves of buck were made by new-comers, such as Mr van der

Byl's park at Irene and Mr Forbes's at Athole, in Ermelo, both

unhappily ruined by the war. But many veld farmers had their small

reserves of springbok or blesbok, and permitted no hunting within them.

Some did it as a speculation, being always ready to lease a day's

shooting to a gun from Johannesburg, and many for the reason that they

sought big farms and complete solitude--to pander to a sense of

possession. But in all, perhaps, there was a strain of honest pleasure

in wild life, a desire to encircle their homes with the surroundings

of their early hunting days. In which case, it is another of the

anomalies which warn us off hasty generalisations.

CHAPTER V.

THE BOER IN ALL SERIOUSNESS.[10]

The Boer character has suffered by its simplicity. It has, as a rule,

been crudely summed up in half a dozen denunciatory sentences, or, in

the case of more curious students, it has been analysed and defined

with a subtlety for which there is no warrant. A hasty condemnation is

not the method for a product so full of difficulty and interest, and a

chain of laborious paradoxes scarcely enables us to comprehend a thing

which is pre-eminently broad and simple. The Boer has rarely been

understood by people who give their impressions to the world, but he

has been very completely understood by plain men who have dwelt beside

him and experienced his ways in the many relations of life. It is easy

to dismiss him with a hostile epigram; easy, too, to build up an

edifice of neat contradictions, after the fashion of what Senancour

has called "le vulgaire des sages," and label it the Boer character.

The first way commends itself to party feeling; the second appeals to

a nation which has confessedly never understood its opponents, and is

ready now to admit its ignorance and excuse itself by the amazing

complexity of the subject. Sympathy, which is the only path to true

understanding, was made difficult by the mists of war, and, when all

was over, by the exceeding dreariness of the conquered people. There

was little romance in the slouching bearded men with flat faces and

lustreless eyes who handed in their rifles and came under our flag;

National Scouts, haggling over money terms, and the begging tour of

the generals, seemed to have reduced honour to a matter of shillings

and pence, and dispelled the glamour of many hard-fought battlefields.

There is a perennial charm about an _ancien regime_; but this poor

_ancien regime_ had no purple and fine gold for the sentimental--only

a hodden-grey burgess society, an unlovely Kirk, and a prosaic

constitution.

And yet the proper understanding of this character is of the first

political importance, and a task well worth undertaking for its own

sake. Those men are for ever our neighbours and fellow-citizens, and

it is the part of wisdom to understand the present that it may prepare

against the future. To the amateur of racial character there is the

chance of reading in the largest letters the lesson of historical

development, for we know their antecedents, we can see clearly the

simple events of their recent history, and we have before us a

product, as it were, isolated and focussed for observation. Nor can

sympathy be wanting in a fair observer,--sympathy for courage,

tenacity of purpose, a simple fidelity to racial ideals. No man who

has lived much with the people can regard them without a little

aversion, a strong liking, and a large and generous respect.

In any racial inquiry there are certain determinant factors which form

the axioms of the problem. In the case of a long-settled people these

are so intricate and numerous that it is impossible to disentangle

more than a few of the more obvious, and we explain development,

naturally and logically, rather by the conscious principles which the

race assimilated than by the objective forces which acted upon it from

the outer world. But in the case of a savage or a backward nation, the

history is simple, the ingredients in racial character few and

intelligible. The wars of the spirit and the growth of philosophies

are potent influences, but their history is speculative and recondite.

But the struggle for bare life falls always in simple forms, and

physical forces leave their mark rudely upon the object they work on.

In this case we have a national life less than a century long, a mode

of society all but uniform, a creed short and unsophisticated, an

intelligible descent, and a country which stamps itself readily upon

its people. Origin, history, natural environment, accidental modes of

civilisation, these are the main factors in that composite thing we

call character. We can read them in the individual: we can read them

writ large in a race which is little more than the individual writ

large. In complex societies the composition is a chemical process, the

result is a new product, not to be linked with any ingredient; the

soul and mind of the populace is something different in kind from the

average soul and mind of its units. But in this collection of hardy

individualists there was no novel result, and the type is repeated

with such scanty variations that we may borrow the attributes of the

individual for our definition of the race.

Descent, history, natural environment have laid the foundation of the

Boer character. The old sluggish Batavian stock (not of the best

quality, for the first settlers were as a rule of the poorest and

least reputable class) was leavened with a finer French strain, and

tinctured with a little native blood. Living a clannish life in

solitude, the people intermarried closely, and suffered the fate of

inbreeders in a loss of facial variety and a gradual coarsening of

feature. Their history was a record of fierce warfare with savage

nature, and the evolution of a peculiar set of traditions which soon

came into opposition with imported European ideas. They evolved,

partly from the needs of their society and partly from distorted

echoes of revolutionary dogma, an embryo political creed, and in

religion they established a variant of sixteenth-century Protestantism.

Their life, and the vast spaces of earth and sky amid which they lived,

strengthened the patriarchal individualism in their blood. The whole

process of development, so remote from the common racial experience,

produced in the Boer character a tissue of contradictions which resist

all attempts at an easy summary. He was profoundly religious, with the

language of piety always on his lips, and yet deeply sunk in matter.

Without imagination, he had the habits of a recluse and in a coarse way

the instincts of the poet. He was extremely narrow in a bargain, and

extremely hospitable. With a keen sense of justice, he connived at

corruption and applauded oppression. A severe moral critic, he was

often lax, and sometimes unnatural, in his sexual relations. He was

brave in sport and battle, but his heroics had always a mercantile

basis, and he would as soon die for an ideal, as it is commonly

understood, as sell his farm for a sixpence. There were few virtues or

vices which one could deny him utterly or with which one could credit

him honestly. In short, the typical Boer to the typical observer

became a sort of mixture of satyr, Puritan, and successful merchant,

rather interesting, rather distasteful, and wholly incomprehensible.

And yet the phenomenon is perfectly normal. The Boer is a representative

on a grand scale of a type which no nation is without. He is the

ordinary backward countryman, more backward and more of a countryman

than is usual in our modern world. At one time this was the current

view--a "race of farmers," a "pastoral folk"; but the early months of

the war brought about a reversal of judgment, and he was credited with

the most intricate urban vices. Such a false opinion was the result of a

too conventional view of the rural character. There is nothing Arcadian

about the Boer, as there is certainly nothing Arcadian about the average

peasant. A Corot background, a pastoral pipe, and a flavour of

honeysuckle, must be expelled from the picture. To analyse what is

grandiloquently called the "folk-heart," is to see in its rude virtues

and vices an exact replica of the life of the veld. "Simple" and

"pastoral," on a proper understanding of the terms, are the last words

in definition.

Let us take an average household. Jan Celliers (pronounced Seljee)

lives on his farm of 3000 morgen with his second wife and a family of

twelve. His father was a voortrekker, and the great Sarel was a

far-out cousin. Two cousins of his mother and their families squat as

bywoners on his land, and an orphan daughter of his sister lives in

his household. The farmhouse is built of sun-dried bricks, whitewashed

in front, and consists of a small kitchen, a large room which is

parlour and dining-room in one, and three small chambers where the

family sleep. Twelve families of natives live in a little kraal,

cultivate their own mealie-patches, and supply the labour of the farm,

while two half-caste Cape boys, Andries and Abraham, who attend to the

horses, have a rude shanty behind the stable. Jan has a dam from

which he irrigates ten acres of mealies, pumpkins, and potatoes. For

the rest he has 500 Afrikander oxen, which make him a man of substance

among his neighbours, including two spans of matched beasts, fawn and

black, for which he has refused an offer of L30 apiece. He is not an

active farmer, for he does not need to bestir himself. His land yields

him with little labour enough to live on, and a biscuit-tin full of

money, buried in the orchard below the fifth apricot-tree from the

house, secures his mind against an evil day. But he likes to ride

round his herds in the early morning, and to smoke his pipe in his

mealie-patch of a late afternoon. He is not fond of neighbours, but it

is pleasant to him once in a while to go to Pretoria and buy a

cartload of fancy groceries and the very latest plough in the store.

As a boy Jan was a great hunter, and has been with his father to the

Limpopo and the Rooi Rand; but of late game has grown scarce, and Jan

is not the fellow to stir himself to find it. Now and then he shoots a

springbok, and brags wonderfully about his shots, quite regardless of

the presence of his sons who accompany him. These sons are heavy

loutish boys, finer shots by far than Jan, for they have that

infallible eyesight of the Boer youth. They, too, are idle, and are

much abused by their mother, when she is wide awake enough to look

after them. The daughters are plump and shapeless, with pallid

complexions inside their sun-bonnets, and a hoydenish shyness towards

neighbours. Not that they see many neighbours, though rumour has it

that young Coos Pretorius, son of the rich Pretorius, comes now and

then to "opsitten" with the eldest girl. Jan believes in an Old

Testament God, whom he hears of at nachtmaals, for the kirk is too far

off for the ordinary Sabbath-day's journey; but he believes much more

in a spook which lives in the old rhinoceros-hole in the spruit, and

in his own amazing merits. He is sleepily good-natured towards the

world, save to a Jew storekeeper in the town who calls himself on the

sign above his door the "Old Boer's Friend," and on one occasion

cheated him out of L5. But Jan has also had his triumphs, notably when

he induced a coal prospector to prospect in an impossible place and

leave him, free of cost, an excellent well. When war broke out Jan and

three of his sons, sorely against their will, went out on commando.

Two of the boys went to Ceylon, one fell at Spionkop, and Jan himself

remained in the field till the end, and came back as proud as a

peacock to repatriation rations. His womenfolk were in the Middelburg

Burgher camp, where they acquired a taste for society which almost

conquered their love for the farm. At any rate, it was with bitter

complaints that they sat again under a makeshift roof, with no

neighbours except the korhaan and a span of thin repatriation oxen.

Jan did not enjoy war. At first he was desperately afraid, and only

the strangeness of the country and the presence of others kept him

from trekking for home. By-and-by he found amusement in the sport of

the thing, and realised that with caution he might keep pretty well

out of the way of harm. But in the guerilla warfare of the last year

there was no sport, only stark unrelieved misery. Sometimes he thought

of slipping over to the enemy and surrendering; often he wished he had

been captured and sent to Ceylon with his boys; but something which he

did not understand and had never suspected before began to rise in his

soul, a wild obstinacy and a resolve to stand out to the last. Once in

a night attack he was chased by two mounted infantrymen, and turned to

bay in a narrow place, shooting one man and wounding the other badly.

He did his best for the sufferer before making off to the rendezvous,

an incident which has appeared in the picture papers (Jan is depicted

about eight feet high, with a face like Moses, whereas he really is a

broken-nosed little man), and which shows that he had both courage and

kindness somewhere in his slow soul. But he gladly welcomed peace; he

had never cared greatly for politics, and had an ancestral grudge

against the Kruger family; and when he had assured himself that,

instead of losing all, he would get most of his property back, and

perhaps a little for interest, he became quite loyal, and figured

prominently on the local repatriation board. He takes the resident

magistrate out shooting, and has just sold to the Government a

fraction of his farm at an enormous profit.

Such is an ordinary type of our new citizens. If we look at him the

typical countryman stands out clear from the mists of tortuous

psychology. It is an error, doubtless, to assume that the primitive

nature is always simple; it is often bewilderingly complex. An

elaborate civilisation may produce a type which can be analysed under

a dozen categories; while the savage or the backwoodsman may show a

network of curiously interlaced motives. But the man is familiar. We

know others of the family; we have met him in the common relations of

life; he stands before us as a concrete human being.

His most obvious characteristic is his mental sluggishness. Dialectic

rarely penetrates the chain-armour of his prejudices. He has nothing

of the keen receptive mind which, like a sensitive plant, is open to

all the influences of life. His views are the outcome of a long and

sluggish growth, and cling like mandrakes to the roots of his being.

He makes no deductions from ordinary events, and he never follows a

thing to its logical conclusion. His blind faith requires a cataclysm

to shake it, and to revise a belief is impossible for him save under

the stress of pain. Death and burning towns may reveal to him a

principle, but unless it is written large in letters of blood and fire

it escapes his stagnant intelligence. Change is painful to all human

creatures, but such coercion of change is doubly painful, since he has

no scheme of thought into which it can fit, and it means, therefore,

the upturning of the foundations of his world. But the countryman,

while he holds tenaciously his innermost beliefs, has a vast capacity

for doing lip-service to principles which he does not understand. He

sees that certain shibboleths command respect and bring material gain,

so he glibly adopts them without allowing them for a moment to

encroach upon the cherished arcana of his faith. Hence comes the

apparent inconsistency of many simple folk. The Boer had a dozen

principles which he would gladly sell to the highest bidder; but he

had some hundreds of prejudices which he held dearer (almost) than

life. His principles were European importations, democratic political

dogmas, which he used to excellent purpose without caring or

understanding, moral maxims which bore no relation to his own ragged

and twisted ethics. The mild international morality which his leaders

were wont to use as a reproach to Britain seems comically out of place

when we reflect upon the high-handed international code, born of

filibustering and Kaffir wars, which he found in the Scriptures and

had long ago adopted for his own. His political confession of faith,

which the framers of his constitution had borrowed from Europe and

America, with its talk of representation and equal rights and

delegated powers, contrasted oddly with the fierce individualism which

was his innermost conviction, and the cabals and "spoils to the

victor" policy which made up his daily practice. His religion had a

like character. In its essentials it was the same which a generation or

two ago held sway over Galloway peasants and Hebridean fishermen; but

the results were very different. The stern hard-bitten souls who saw

the devil in most of the works of God, and lived ever under a great

Taskmaster's eye, had no kinship with the easy-going sleek-lipped Boer

piety. The Boer religion in practice was a judicious excerpt from the

easier forms of Christianity, while its theory was used to buttress his

self-sufficiency and mastery over weaker neighbours. His political

creed may be stated shortly as a belief in his right to all new

territories in which he set foot, his indefeasible right to control the

native tribes in the way he thought best, a denial of all right of the

State to interfere with him, but an assertion of the duty of the State

to enrich him. To these cardinal articles liberty, equality, and

fraternity were added as an elegant appendage before publication. So,

too, in his religion: God made man of two colours, white and black,

the former to rule the latter till the end of time; God led Israel out

of Egypt and gave to them new lands for their inalienable heritage;

any Egyptian who followed was the apportioned prey of the chosen

people, and it was a duty to spoil him; this beneficent God must

therefore be publicly recognised and frequently referred to in the

speech of daily life, but in the case of the Elect considerable

latitude may be allowed in the practice of the commandments,--such may

fairly be taken as the ordinary unformulated Boer creed. But, as the

statement was too short and bare, all the finer virtues had to be

attached in public profession.

A countryman lives in a narrow world which he knows intimately, but

beyond is an unexplored region which he knows of by hearsay and

fears. He is not naturally suspicious. Among his fellows he is often

confiding to a fault, and a little acquaintance with a dreaded object

will often result in a revulsion to contempt. The Boer has in a

peculiar degree this characteristic of rural peoples. He has an

immense awe of an alien Power while he does not know it, but once let

it commit itself to some weakness, and the absence of all mental

perspective changes the exaggerated awe into an equally exaggerated

condescension. This truth is written clear over the whole history of

England in Africa. A lost battle, a political withdrawal, a wavering

statesman, have had moral effects of incalculable significance. The

burgher who opposed us with terror and despair became at the first

gleam of success a screeching cock-of-the-walk, and this attitude,

jealously fostered, obscured the world to him for the rest of his

days. In our threats he saw bluster, in our kindness he read

weakness, in our diplomacy folly; and he went out at last with the

fullest confidence, which three years of misery have scarcely

uprooted. This is one side of the parochial mind; the other is the

suspicion which became his attitude to everything beyond his beacons.

It is not the proverbial "slimness"; that graceful quality is merely

the rustic cunning which he thought the foundation of business, a

quality as common on Australian stock-runs and Scottish sheep-farms.

His suspicion was his own peculiar possession, born of his history

and his race, and, above all, of his intercourse with native tribes.

He did not give his confidence readily, as who would if he believed

that the world was in league against him? New ideas, new faces, new

inventions were all put on his black list. Like Mr By-ends, he found

his principles easy and profitable, and was resolved to stick to

them. Two forces, however, tended to undermine his distrust. One was

his intense practicality. If his principles ceased to be profitable,

he was prepared, against the grain, to consider emendations. The

second was his crude pleasure in novelties, the curious delight of a

child in a mechanical toy. A musical box, a portrait of Mr Kruger

which, when wound up, emitted the Volkslied, or the latest variety of

mealie-crusher, were attractions which he had no power to resist.

At the root of all his traits lies a meagre imagination. In religion

he turns the stupendous tales of Scripture into a parish chronicle,

with God as a benevolent burgomaster and Moses and the prophets as

glorified landrosts. In politics no Boer since President Burgers saw

things with a large vision, and his rhetorical dreams were folly to

his countrymen. The idea of a great Afrikander state, very vigorously

held elsewhere in South Africa, had small hold on the ordinary

population of the Republics, save upon sons of English fathers or

mothers, half-educated journalists, and European officials. In the

wars which he waged he saw little of the murky splendour which covers

the horrors of death. The pageantry of the veld was nothing to him,

and in the amenities of life he scarcely advanced beyond bare physical

comfort. He had neither art nor literature. If we except Mr Reitz's

delightful verses, which at their happiest are translations of Burns

and Scott, he had not even the songs which are commonly found among

rural peoples. His nursery tales and his few superstitions were

borrowed from the Kaffir. On one side only do we discern any trace of

imaginative power. Somehow at the back of his soul was the love of

the wilds and the open road--a call which, after years of settled

life, had still power to stir the blood of the old hunter. He was not

good at pictorial forecasts, but he had one retrospect stamped on his

brain, and this hunger for old days was a spark of fire which kept

warm a corner of his being.

The typical countryman he remains, typical in his limitations and the

vices which followed them. The chief was his incurable mendacity.

Truth-speaking is always a relative virtue, being to some men an easy

habit, and to others of a livelier fancy a constant and strenuous

effort. The Boer is not brutal, he is eminently law-abiding and sober,

and kindly in most of the relations of life. He has the rustic

looseness in sexual morals, and in the remoter farmhouses this

looseness often took the form of much hideous and unnatural vice. But

the cardinal fault, obvious to the most casual observer, is a contempt

for truth in every guise. Masterful liars, who have held their own in

most parts of the world, are vanquished by the systematic perjury of

the veld. The habit is, no doubt, partly learned from the Kaffir, a

fine natural professor of the art; but to its practice the Boer

brought a stolid patience, an impassive countenance, and a limited

imagination which kept him consistent. He bragged greatly, since to a

solitary man with a high self-esteem this is the natural mode of

emphasising his personality on the rare occasions when he mixes with

his fellows. He lied in business for sound practical reasons. He lied

at home by the tacit consent of his household. The truest way to

outwit him, as many found, was to tell him the naked truth, since his

suspicion saw in every man his own duplicity. But because he is a true

countryman, when once he has proved a man literally truthful he will

trust him with a pathetic simplicity. There were Englishmen in the

land before the war, as there are Englishmen to-day, whose word to the

Boer mind was an inviolable oath.

So far I have described the average Boer failings with all the

unsympathetic plainness which a hostile observer could desire. But

there is a very different side to which it is pleasant to turn. If he

has the countryman's faults strongly developed, he has also in a high

degree the country virtues. Simplicity is not an unmixed blessing; but

it is the mother of certain fine qualities, which are apt to be lost

sight of by a sophisticated world. He could live bare and sleep hard

when the need arose; and if he was sluggish in his daily life it was

the indolence of the sleepy natural world and not the enervation of

decadence. Because his needs were few he was supremely adaptable: a

born pioneer, with his household gods in a waggon and his heart

turning naturally to the wilds. The grandeur of nature was lost on

him; but there is a certain charm in the way in which he brought all

things inside the pale of his domesticity. His homely images have

their own picturesqueness, as when he called the morning star, which

summoned him to inspan, the _voorlooper_, or "little boy who leads out

the oxen." It is the converse of sublimity, and itself not unsublime.

His rude dialect, almost as fine as lowland Scots for telling country

stories, is full of metaphors, so to speak, in solution, often coarse,

but always the fruit of direct and vigorous observation. In short, he

had a personality which stands out simply in all his doings, making

him a living clear-cut figure among the amorphous shades of the indoor

life.

Wild tales and judicious management from Pretoria succeeded in

combining him temporarily into a semblance of a state and a very

formidable reality of an army; but at bottom he is the most dogmatic

individualist in the world. His allegiance was never to a chief or a

state, but to his family. The family was generously interpreted, so

that distant relations came within its fold. This clannishness has not

been sufficiently recognised; but it is a real social force, and of

great importance to a survey of Boer society. In the country farms,

with their system of bywoners, a whole cycle of relations lived, all

depending upon the head of the household for their subsistence. When

sons or daughters married they lived on in the homestead, and as their

children grew up and married in turn they squatted on a corner of the

farm. The system led to abuses, notably in the ridiculous subdivision

of land and the endless servitudes and burdens imposed on real estate;

but it relieved the community of any need for orphanages and

workhouses. The Boer's treatment of orphans does him much credit.

However poor, a family would make room for orphaned children, and

there was no distinction in their usage. It is a primitive virtue, a

heritage from the days when white folk were few in numbers: a little

family in the heart of savagery, bound together by a common origin and

a common fear.

But his chief virtue was his old-fashioned hospitality. A stranger

rarely knocked at his gates in vain. You arrived at a farmhouse and

asked leave to outspan by the spruit. Permission was freely granted,

and in a little girls came out with coffee for the travellers. An

invitation to supper usually followed, and there is no better fare in

the world than a chicken roasted by a Boer housewife and her home-made

sausages. Then followed slow talk over deep-bowled pipes, and then

good-night, with much handshaking and good wishes. And so all over

the veld. The family might be wretchedly poor, but they dutifully and

cheerfully gave what they had. In the early months of peace it was a

common thing to come on a Boer family living in a hut of biscuit tins

or a torn tent, with scanty rations and miserably ragged clothes. But

those people, in most cases, set the little they had gladly before the

stranger. The Boer, who will perjure himself deeply to save a

shilling, will part with a pound's worth of entertainment without a

thought.

And, as a host, he has a natural dignity beyond praise. A placid life,

backed by an overwhelming sense of worth, is a fine basis for good

manners. Boastfulness and prejudice may come later, but the first

impression is of an antique kindliness and ease. The veld has no

nerves, no uneasy consciousness of inferiority, least of all the

cringing friendliness of the low European. The farmer, believing in

nothing beyond his ken, makes the stranger welcome as a harmless

courier from a trivial world. No contrast can be more vivid than

between the nervous, bustling cosmopolitans who throng the Rand and

the silent veld-dwellers. The Boer type of countenance is not often

handsome; frequently it is flat and expressionless, lustreless grey

eyes with small pupils, and hair growing back from chin and lip. But

it is almost always the embodiment of repose, and in the finer stock

it sometimes reaches an archaic and patriarchal dignity. The same

praise cannot be given to the _jeunesse doree_ of the Afrikander

world, who acquired the smattering of an education and migrated to the

towns. Ignorant, swaggering, mentally and bodily underbred, they form

a distressing class of people who have somehow missed civilisation and

hit upon the vulgarity of its decline. They claim glibly and falsely

the virtues which their fathers possessed without advertisement. Much

of the bad blood and spurious nationalism in the country comes from

this crew, who, in partnership with the worst type of European

adventurer, have done their best to discredit their nation. The true

country Boer regards them much as the silent elder Mirabeau and

Zachary Macaulay must have regarded their voluble sons--with

considerable distrust, a little disfavour, and not a little secret

admiration for a trick which has no place in his world.

* * * * *

Understanding is the only basis of a policy towards this remarkable

section of our fellow-citizens--understanding, and a decent abstinence

from subtleties. We used to flatter our souls that we created our

Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, and in all our troubles convinced

ourselves that we were destined to "muddle through." But there are

limits to this policy of serene trust in Providence, and it is rather

our duty to thank God we have taken so few falls, and brace our minds

to forethought and prudence. The Boer is the easiest creature in the

world to govern. He is naturally law-abiding, and he has an enormous

respect for the accomplished fact. True union may take long, but the

nominal amalgamation which is necessary for smooth government already

exists. We must understand how slow he is to learn, how deep his pride

is, how lively his suspicions. Spiritually he will be a slow pupil, but

with proper care politically he may be a ready learner. He has a

curiously acute sense of justice, which makes him grumble at

compulsion, but obey, and end by applauding. He is also quick to

realise what is competent and successful in administration. He will

give everything a fair trial, waiting, watching, and forming his slow

mind; and if a thing is a practical fiasco, he will laugh at it in the

end. The practical is the last touchstone for him. He is not easily

made drunk with the ideals of ordinary democracy; an efficient

government, however naked of adornments, will always command his

respect, and the fool, though buttressed with every sublime aspiration,

will find him adamant. To a government which can estimate the situation

soberly and face it manfully he is a simple problem. But he will be a

hard critic of weakness, and when once his laggard opinions are formed

it will be a giant's task to shake them. The war has broken his old

arrogance, and he now waits to make up his mind on the new _regime_. We

shall get justice from him from the start--laborious justice and

nothing more. If we fail, all the honesty of purpose on earth will not

save us; for to the Boer good intentions may preserve a man's soul in

another world, but they cannot excuse him in this one. There is much

practical truth in Bunyan's parable when he makes Old Honest come "from

the town of Stupidity," which town "lieth four degrees _beyond_ the

City of Destruction."

If the Boer is once won to our side we shall have secured one of the

greatest colonising forces in the world. We can ask for no better

dwellers upon a frontier. If the plateaux of our Central and East

African possessions are to be permanently held by the white man, I

believe it will be by this people who have never turned their back

upon a country which seemed to promise good pasture-land. Other races

send forth casual pioneers, who return and report and then go

elsewhere; but the Boer takes his wife and family and all his

belongings, and in a decade is part of the soil. In the midst of any

savagery he will plant his rude domesticity, and the land is won. With

all her colonising activity, Britain can ill afford to lose from her

flag a force so masterful, persistent, and sure.

[10] The word "Boer" is used in this chapter to denote the

average country farmer in the new colonies, and not the

educated Dutch of the towns.

PART II.

NOTES OF TRAVEL

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-scene_ 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 Thermopylae 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.

"Lo, for there among the flowers and grasses

Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;

Only winds and rivers,

Life and death."

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 _debris_ 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

"Wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world";

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

"Acerbo indegno mistero della cose,"

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.

[11] Zeerust is a type of the curious truncated Boer

nomenclature, being a corruption of Coetzee's Rust.

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 Thermopylae 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--

"Here in green meadows sits Eternal May,"

or Theocritus's--

~pant' osden thereos mala pionos osde d' oporas~,

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.

"We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live;

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

And would we aught behold of higher worth

Than that inanimate cold world allowed

To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd,

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

Enveloping the earth."

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 L20,000; 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 _debris_ 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 AEmilian

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 Shire 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 grace_, 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 L3 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

L25. 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.

[12] In other parts of British Africa the policy of reserves

has received full recognition. In East Africa there are

two large reserves, one along the Uganda Railway and

the other near Lake Rudolf. In the Soudan there is a

vast reserve between the Blue and the White Niles, and

most of the best shooting-ground throughout the country

is strictly protected.

[13] The eland is the one conspicuous exception.

[14] A Transvaal friend informs me that my classification,

though the one commonly in use, is quite inaccurate. The

yellow-fish and the white-fish are not carp but species

of barbel, and what I have called barbel is another

variant of the same family, called by the Dutch

"kalverskop," or "calf's-head," from its shape. There is

no true carp, though the Dutch give the name of "kurper"

to a very curious little fish about four inches long

which is common in streams flowing into the Vaal. The

other chief varieties are the coarse mud-fish and the

cat-fish, which latter is often mixed up with the

barbel. It is to be hoped that some local ichthyologist

will give his attention to the native fishes--a very

interesting subject, and one at present in the most

unscientific confusion.

PART III.

THE POLITICAL PROBLEM