The heat was terrible.
Terrible, even for the parched, burning steppes of the High Veldt, whose
baked and crumbling surface lay gasping in cracks and fissures beneath
the blazing fierceness of the African sun. Terrible for the stock,
enfeebled and emaciated after months of bare subsistence on such
miserable wiry blades of shrivelled grass as it could manage to pick up,
and on the burnt and withered Karroo bushes. Doubly terrible for those
to whom the wretched animals, all skin and bone, and dying off like
flies, represented nothing more nor less than the means of livelihood
itself.
Far away to the sky-line on every side, far as the eye could travel,
stretched the dead, weary surface of the plain. Not a tree, not a bush
to break the level. On the one hand a low range of flat-topped hills
floated, mirage like, in mid-air, so distant that a day's journey would
hardly seem to bring you any nearer; on the other, nothing--nothing but
plain and sky, nothing but the hard red earth, shimmering like a furnace
in the intolerable afternoon heat; nothing but a frightful desert,
wherein, apparently, no human being could live--not even the ape-like
Bushman or the wild Koranna. Yet, there stands a house.
A house thoroughly in keeping with its surroundings. A low one-storied
building, with a thatched roof and walls of sun-baked brick. Just a
plain parallelogram; no attempt at ornamentation, no verandah, not even
a _stoep_. No trace of a garden either, for in this horrible desert of
drought and aridity nothing will grow. Hard by stand the square stone
kraals for the stock, and a little further on, where the level of the
plain sinks into a slight depression, is an artificial dam, its liquid
store at present reduced to a small patch of red and turgid water lying
in the middle of a surrounding margin of dry flaky mud, baked into a
criss-cross pattern of cracks, like a huge mosaic.
On a low, stony _kopje_, a few hundred yards distant from this
uninviting homestead, sits its owner. Nobody but a Boer could dwell in
such a place, would be the first thought succeeding that of wonder that
any white man could be found to inhabit it at all. But a glance would
suffice to show that he now sitting there is not a member of that dogged
and pachydermatous race. The face is a fine--even a noble--one, whose
features the bronzed and weatherworn results of a hard life have failed
to roughen. A broad, lofty brow, and pensive dark eyes stamp their
owner as a man of intellect and thought, while the peculiar curve of the
well-formed nostrils betokens a sensitive and self-contained nature.
The lower half of the face is hidden by a dark silky beard and
moustache.
One brown, sinewy hand grasps a geologist's hammer, with which it chips
away listlessly at the ground. But, although the action is now purely
mechanical, it is not always so, as we shall see if we use our
story-teller's privilege and dip into his inner thoughts. Briefly
rendered, they run in this wise:
"Oh, this awful drought! When is it going to end? Not that it much
matters, either way, now, for there's hardly a sound hoof left on the
place; and, even if a good rain did come, it would only finish off the
whole fever-stricken lot. Well, I'll have to clear out, that's one
consolation. I've held on as long as any man could, and now I'll just
have to go."
His gaze wanders over the arid plain. Far away through the shimmer it
rests on a multitude of white specks--a flock of Angora goats, striving
in desperation to pick up what miserable subsistence it may.
"There's nothing to be done with the place--nothing," he muses, bringing
his hammer down upon a boulder with a despairing whack. "It won't sell
even for an old song--no one will so much as touch land now, nor will
they for a long time to come, and there isn't a `stone' [`Diamond' in
digger parlance] on the whole farm, for I've dug and fossicked in every
likely place, and unlikely one, too. No; I'll shut up shop and get
away. The few miserable brutes left are not worth looking after--not
worth their _brand ziek_ [Scab-affected] skins. Yet I'll have one more
search, one more crazy fool's errand, after the `Valley of the Eye,'
before I trek. This 'll make the fifth--but, no matter. One may as
well make an ass of oneself five times as four. I can't exactly believe
old Greenway took all that trouble to dictate an infernal lie on his
death-bed; and, if his yarn's true, I'm a rich man for life--if I can
only find the place, that is," he adds bitterly. "And I've had four
shies at it. Well, perhaps the fifth is going to be lucky."
With which consoling reflection the thinker rises from his stony
resting-place, revealing as he does so a tall, straight figure,
admirably proportioned. Suddenly he starts, and a sallow paleness comes
over the bronzed, handsome features. For he is conscious of a strange
giddiness. A mist seems to float before his eyes, shutting out
completely the glare of the burning veldt.
"Never that cursed up-country fever again?" he murmurs, to himself, in
real alarm.
And for the latter there is reason--reason in the abnormal and unhealthy
heat of the terrible drought--reason in his utter isolation, the vast
distance between himself and a fellow-countryman--let alone such
considerations as medical aid.
Recovering himself with an effort, he strolls on towards the house.
There is no sign of life about the place as he approaches, unless a
couple of miserable, fever-stricken sheep, panting and wheezing in the
shade of the kraal wall, constitute such. But, dead and tomb-like as it
looks outside, there is something refreshing in the coolness of the
inner room as he enters. A rough tablecloth is laid, and a knife and
fork. The walls are papered with pictures from illustrated prints, and
are hung with swinging shelves containing a goodly number of books of
all sorts. A few chairs and a couch, the latter much the worse for
wear, constitute the furniture; and, on the whole, what with pipes,
stray bits of saddlery, and miscellaneous odds and ends of every
description, the place is about as untidy as the average bachelor abode
is apt to be within the pale of civilisation, let alone away on the High
Veldt. The floor is of hardened clay, and there is no ceiling--nothing
between the inmate of the room and the bare and ragged thatch, one
drawback to which arrangement being that a fine, lively tarantula will
occasionally drop down upon the head or shoulder of the said inmate.
A call of "Kaatje. Dinner bring," is soon productive of that meal, in
so far as the remnant of a half-starved and wholly unnutritious chicken,
dressed up with so insipid an ingredient as some plain boiled rice, can
be said to constitute dinner. It is productive, simultaneously, of an
extraordinary specimen of humanity.
A creature of mahogany hue and parchment hide, the latter hanging in
flaps around her perspiring and scantily-attired person. A creature of
the hideosity of one of Bunyan's fiends--a frightful grin, horn-like
ears, and a woolly skull--waddling on the abnormal hip-development of
the native Bushman or Koranna. A nice sort of being to bring in one's
dinner, not of itself over-inviting! But one gets used to queer things
on the High Veldt, and this hideous and repulsive object is only a
harmless Koranna woman, and according to her lights a good old soul
enough; and she officiates as cook and general factotum to this rough
and ready household of one.
The swarming flies buzz around. The windows are black with them; the
table is black with them; the air is thick with them. In they sail
through open windows and open doors, fresh from the foetid stew-pans of
the kitchen; fresh from the acrid, pungent dust of the goat kraals;
fresh from the latest garbage, which they have been sharing with carrion
birds, in the veldt. They light on the diner's head, crawl about his
face, crowd over plates and dishes and tablecloth--mix themselves up
with the food, drown themselves in the drink. Everywhere flies.
The South African house-fly is identical with the British, but he is a
far greater pest. He is more aggressive, and he brings to bear upon his
victims the solid weight of numbers. Go where you will, you cannot
shake him off. If you fit up a waggon, and dive into the far interior,
there also will the common fly be with you--and with you in swarms.
Renshaw Fanning looks disgustedly at his uninviting meal, and plays with
it rather than eats. Then he pushes back his chair. He has no
appetite.
Again he seeks the open air. A restless mood is upon him, and broiling,
stifling as the heat is outside, he cannot remain in the house.
Suddenly a winged object appears fluttering in the sunlight. A quick
exclamation escapes him, as he shades his eyes to watch it.
"Ha, of course! The last straw! Locusts. Here they come, by Jove!
thicker and thicker to put the finishing touch on what the drought has
begun. By this time to-morrow there won't be a blade of grass left on
the place, nor a hoof either."
He stands watching the flying insects. Barely five minutes after the
discovery of the first one, the air is thick with them. They seem to
spring out of nowhere. Thicker and thicker they come, their gauzy wings
fluttering in the sunlight, blundering into the spectator's face,
colliding with the walls, falling to the ground. It is an ill wind that
blows nobody good. A few starved fowls at the back of the house perk up
into new life as they rush forth to fill their emaciated carcases with
this unlooked-for and abundant dainty. But the watcher withdraws
indoors again, as if to shut out all sight and sound of these new and
fatal intruders, and, as he does so, he is conscious of terrible
shooting pains in his limbs.
Though of Irish parentage on one side, Renshaw Fanning is South African
born. His life, so far--and he is now thirty-five--has been a hard one.
Few, indeed, are the wilder, rougher phases of South African life of
which he has not had more or less experience. He has farmed and has
ridden transport [Carriage of goods by waggon], he has hunted and traded
in the far interior, he has been a treasure-seeker, and has also fought
in the border warfare which now and then breaks out between the
colonists and their savage neighbours. But profitable as some of these
avocations frequently are, somehow or other Renshaw Fanning has never
seemed to make a success of anything, and this is mainly owing to the
extraordinary unselfishness of the man. He will divest himself of his
last shilling to help a friend in need, or even a mere acquaintance--
indeed, he owes the possession of his arid and uninviting desert farm to
this very failing, in that he has been forced to accept it in
satisfaction of a bad debt which would otherwise completely have ruined
him. As a matter of course, his friends and acquaintances vote him a
fool, but deep down in their hearts lies a mine of respect for the only
thoroughly unselfish man they have ever known; and even the unscrupulous
ones who have traded upon and profited by his failing did so with
compunction.
But with all his soft-heartedness and sensitive and retiring
temperament, none who knew him have ever for a moment mistaken Renshaw
Fanning for a muff. No cooler brain exists, no steadier hand or keener
eye in times of danger or dangerous sport--whether at a critical moment,
at the mercy of some treacherously disposed barbarian tribe in the far
interior, or with finger on trigger awaiting the lightning-like charge
of a wounded and infuriated lion. Or on treasure-seeking enterprise,
when physical obstacles combined with failure of water and scarcity of
provisions to render advance or retreat a work of almost superhuman
difficulty, the post of hardship and privation was that which he
unobtrusively assumed; and, indeed, there are men still living who, but
for this, would long since have left their bones in the desert--
occupants of unknown graves. No, assuredly none who know him can ever
mistake Renshaw Fanning for a muff.
Such is the man whom we see, solitary, depressed, and in breaking
health, contemplating, on his desert farm, the approach of ruin--which
ruin all efforts on his part are powerless to avert.