His kingdom covers on the map a vast but ill-defined area, stretching on the west into the Kalahari Desert, and on the north-west into the thinly peopled country round Lake Ngami, where various small tribes live in practical independence. Sovereignty among African natives is tribal rather than territorial. Khama is the chief of the Bamangwato, rather than ruler of a country, and where the Bamangwato dwell there Khama reigns. A large proportion of them dwell in or near Palapshwye. Born about 1830, he is by far the most remarkable Kafir now living in South Africa, for he has shown a tact, prudence, and tenacity of purpose which would have done credit to a European statesman. He was converted to Christianity while still a boy, and had much persecution to endure at the hands of his heathen father, who at last banished him for refusing to take a second wife. What is not less remarkable, he has carried his Christianity into practice, evincing both a sense of honour as well as a humanity which has made him the special protector of the old and the weak, and even of the Bushmen who serve the Bamangwato. Regarded as fighters, his people are far inferior to the Matabili, and he was often in danger of being overpowered by the fierce and rapacious Lo Bengula.
As early as 1862 he crossed a.s.sagais with and defeated a Matabili _impi_ (war-band), earning the praise of the grim Mosilikatze, who said, "Khama is a man. There is no other man among the Bamangwato." Though frequently thereafter threatened and sometimes attacked, he succeeded, by his skilful policy, in avoiding any serious war until the fall of Lo Bengula in 1893. Seeing the tide of white conquest rising all round him, he has had a difficult problem to face, and it is not surprising that he has been less eager to welcome the Company and its railway than those who considered him the white man"s friend had expected. The coming of the whites means not only the coming of liquor, but the gradual occupation of the large open tracts where the natives have hunted and pastured their cattle, with a consequent change in their mode of life, which, inevitable as it may be, a patriotic chief must naturally wish to delay.
Palapshwye, the largest native town south of the Zambesi, is an immense ma.s.s of huts, planted without the smallest attempt at order over the sandy hill slope, some two square miles in extent. The huts are small, with low walls of clay and roofs of gra.s.s, so that from a distance the place looks like a wilderness of beehives. Each of the chief men has his own hut and those of his wives inclosed in a rough fence of thorns, or perhaps of p.r.i.c.kly-pear, and between the groups of huts lie open s.p.a.ces of sand or dusty tracks. In the middle of the town close to the huts of Khama himself, who, however, being a Christian, has but one wife, stands the great kraal or _kothla_. It is an inclosure some three hundred yards in circ.u.mference, surrounded by a stockade ten feet high, made of dry trunks and boughs of trees stuck in the ground so close together that one could not even shoot a gun, or hurl an a.s.sagai through them. The stockade might resist the first attack of native enemies if the rest of the town had been captured, but it would soon yield to fire. In the middle of it stands the now dry trunk of an old tree, spared when the other trees were cut down to make the kraal, because it was supposed to have magical powers, and heal those who touched it. A heap of giraffe skins lay piled against it, but its healing capacity now finds less credit, at least among those who wish to stand well with the chief.
Within this inclosure Khama holds his general a.s.semblies when he has some address to deliver to the people or some ordinance to proclaim. He administers criminal justice among his subjects, and decides their civil disputes, usually with the aid of one or two elderly counsellors. He has tried to improve their agricultural methods, and being fond of horses has formed a good stud. Unhappily, in 1896, the great murrain descended upon the Bamangwato, and Khama and his tribe lost nearly all the cattle (said to have numbered eight hundred thousand) in which their wealth consisted.
The British magistrate--there are about seventy Europeans living in the town--described these Bechuanas as a quiet folk, not hard to manage.
They have less force of character and much less taste for fighting than Zulus or Matabili. The main impression which they leave on a stranger is that of laziness. Of the many whom we saw hanging about in the sun, hardly one seemed to be doing any kind of work. Nor do they. They grow a few mealies (maize), but it is chiefly the women who hoe and plant the ground. They know how to handle wire and twist it round the handles of the _sjamboks_ (whips of hippopotamus hide). But having few wants and no ambition, they have practically no industries, and spend their lives in sleeping, loafing, and talking. When one watches such a race, it seems all the more strange that a man of such remarkable force of character as Khama should suddenly appear among them.[45]
For about sixty miles north-eastward from Palapshwye the country continues dull, dry, and mostly level. After that rocky hills appear, and in the beds of the larger streams a little water is seen. At Tati, ninety miles from Palapshwye (nearly four hundred from Mafeking), gold reefs have been worked at intervals for five and twenty years, under a concession originally granted (1869), by Lo Bengula, and a little European settlement has grown up. Here one pa.s.ses from Bechua.n.a.land into the territories which belonged to the Matabili, and now to the British South Africa Company. The country rises and grows more picturesque. The gra.s.s is greener on the pastures. New trees appear, some of them bearing beautiful flowers, and the air is full of tales of lions. For, in Africa, where there is more gra.s.s there is more game, and where there is more game there are more beasts of prey. Lions, we were told, had last week dragged a Kafir from beneath a waggon where he was sleeping. Lions had been seen yester eve trotting before the coach. Lions would probably be seen again to-morrow. But to us the beast was always a lion of yesterday or a lion of to-morrow, never a lion of to-day. The most direct evidence we had of his presence was when, some days later, we were shown a horse on which that morning a lion had sprung, inflicting terrible wounds. The rider was not touched, and galloped the poor animal back to camp. At Mangwe, a pretty little station with exceptionally bad sleeping quarters, the romantic part of the country may be said to begin. All round there are rocky kopjes, and the track which leads northward follows a line of hollows between them, called the Mangwe Pa.s.s, a point which was of much strategical importance in the Matabili war of 1893, and became again of so much importance in the recent native rising (1896) that one of the first acts of the British authorities was to construct a rough fort in it and place a garrison there. Oddly enough, the insurgents did not try to occupy it, and thereby cut off the English in Matabililand from their railway base at Mafeking, the reason being, as I was informed, that the _Molimo_, or prophet, whose incitements contributed to the insurrection, had told them that it was by the road through this pa.s.s that the white strangers would quit the country for ever.
A more peaceful spot could not be imagined than the pa.s.s was when we pa.s.sed through it at 5 A.M., "under the opening eyelids of the dawn."
Smooth green lawns, each surrounded by a fringe of wood, and filled with the songs of awakening birds, lay beneath the beetling crags of granite,--granite whose natural grey was hidden by brilliant red and yellow lichens,--and here and there a clear streamlet trickled across the path. Climbing to the top of one of these rocky ma.s.ses, I enjoyed a superb view to north, west, and east, over a wilderness of rugged hills, with huge ma.s.ses of grey rock rising out of a feathery forest, while to the north the undulating line, faintly blue in the far distance, marked the point where the plateau of central Matabililand begins to decline toward the valley of the Zambesi. It was a beautiful prospect both in the wild variety of the foreground and in the delicate hues of ridge after ridge melting away towards the horizon, and it was all waste and silent, as it has been since the world began.
The track winds through the hills for some six or eight miles before it emerges on the more open country. These kopjes, which form a sort of range running east-south-east and west-north-west, are the Matoppo Hills, in which the main body of the Matabili and other insurgent natives held their ground during the months of April, May and June, 1896. Although the wood is not dense, by no means so hard to penetrate as the bush or low scrub which baffled the British troops in the early Kafir wars, waged on the eastern border of Cape Colony, still the ground is so very rough, and the tumbled ma.s.ses of rock which lie round the foot of the granite kopjes afford so many spots for hiding, that the agile native, who knows the ground, had a far better chance against the firearms of the white men than he could have had in the open country where the battles of 1893 took place. Seeing such a country one can well understand that it was quite as much by famine as by fighting that the rising of 1896 was brought to an end.
From the northern end of the Mangwe Pa.s.s it is over forty miles to Bulawayo, the goal of our journey, and the starting-point for our return journey to the coast of the Indian Ocean. But Bulawayo is too important a place to be dealt with at the end of a chapter already sufficiently long.
[Footnote 40: "Already night saw all the stars of the other pole, and ours brought so low that it rose not from the surface of the sea."]
[Footnote 41: Called after Constance, wife of Governor Adrian van der Stel.]
[Footnote 42: Nimble climbers will do well to descend from the top down a grand cleft in the rocks, very narrow and extremely steep, which is called the Great Kloof. At its bottom, just behind Cape Town, one sees in a stream-bed the granite rock on which the horizontal strata of sandstone that form Table Mountain rest.]
[Footnote 43: Here, in December, 1896, the natives rose in revolt, exasperated by the slaughter of their cattle, though that slaughter was the only method of checking the progress of the cattle plague.]
[Footnote 44: There is also a weaker kind made, intoxicating only if consumed in very large quant.i.ty.]
[Footnote 45: For most of what is here stated regarding Khama I am indebted to an interesting little book by the late Bishop Knight-Bruce, ent.i.tled _Khama, an African Chief_.]
CHAPTER XV
FROM BULAWAYO TO FORT SALISBURY--MATABILILAND AND MASHONALAND
Bulawayo means, in the Zulu tongue, the place of slaughter, and under the sway of Lo Bengula it deserved its name. Just sixty years ago Mosilikatze, chief of the Matabili, driven out of what is now the Transvaal Republic by the Dutch Boers who had emigrated from Cape Colony, fled four hundred miles to the north-west and fell like a sudden tempest upon the Makalakas and other feeble tribes who pastured their cattle in this remote region. His tribe was not large, but every man was a tried warrior. The Makalakas were slaughtered or chased away or reduced to slavery, and when Mosilikatze died in 1870, his son Lo Bengula succeeded to the most powerful kingdom in South Africa after that of Cetewayo, chief of the Zulus. Of the native town which grew up round the king"s kraal there is now not a trace--all was destroyed in 1893. The kraal itself, which Lo Bengula fired when he fled away, has gone, and only one old tree marks the spot where the king used to sit administering justice to his subjects. A large part of this justice consisted in decreeing death to those among his _indunas_ or other prominent men who had excited his suspicions or whose cattle he desired to appropriate. Sometimes he had them denounced--"smelt out," they called it--by the witch-doctors as guilty of practising magic against him. Sometimes he dispensed with a pretext, and sent a messenger to the hut of the doomed man to tell him the king wanted him. The victim, often ignorant of his fate, walked in front, while the executioner, following close behind, suddenly dealt him with the _k.n.o.b-kerry_, or heavy-ended stick, one tremendous blow, which crushed his skull and left him dead upon the ground. Women, on the other hand, were strangled.[46] No one disputed the despot"s will, for the Matabili, like other Zulus, show to their king the absolute submission of soldiers to their general, while the less martial tribes, such as the Bechuanas and Basutos, obey the chief only when he has the sentiment of the tribe behind him. One thing, however, the king could not do. He owned a large part of all the cattle of the tribe, and he a.s.sumed the power to grant concessions to dig for minerals. But the land belonged to the whole tribe by right of conquest, and he had no power to alienate it.
Moved by the a.s.sociations of the ancient capital, Mr. Rhodes directed the residence of the Administrator, Government House, as it is called, to be built on the site of Lo Bengula"s kraal. But the spot was not a convenient one for the creation of a European town, for it was a good way from any stream, and there was believed to be a valuable gold-reef immediately under it. Accordingly, a new site was chosen, on somewhat lower ground, about two miles to the south-west. Here new Bulawayo stands, having risen with a rapidity rivalling that of a mining-camp in Western America. The site has no natural beauty, for the landscape is dull, with nothing to relieve its monotonous lines except the hill of Tsaba Induna, about fifteen miles distant to the east. The ground on which the town stands, sloping gently to the south, is bare, dusty, and wind-swept, like the country all round. However, the gum-trees, planted in the beginning of 1894, when the streets were laid out, had already shot up to twelve or fifteen feet in height and began to give some little shade. Brick houses were rising here and there among the wooden shanties and the sheds of corrugated iron. An opera house was talked of, and already the cricket-ground and racecourse, without which Englishmen cannot be happy, had been laid out. Town lots, or "stands," as they are called in South Africa, had gone up to prices which nothing but a career of swift and brilliant prosperity could justify. However, that prosperity seemed to the inhabitants of Bulawayo to be a.s.sured. Settlers kept flocking in. Storekeepers and hotel-keepers were doing a roaring trade. Samples of ore were every day being brought in from newly explored gold-reefs, and all men"s talk was of pennyweights, or even ounces, to the ton. Everybody was cheerful, because everybody was hopeful. It was not surprising. There is something intoxicating in the atmosphere of a perfectly new country, with its undeveloped and undefined possibilities: and the easy acquisition of this s.p.a.cious and healthful land, the sudden rise of this English town, where two years before there had been nothing but the huts of squalid savages, had filled every one with a delightful sense of the power of civilized man to subjugate the earth and draw from it boundless wealth. Perhaps something may also be set down to the climate. Bulawayo is not beautiful. Far more attractive sites might have been found among the hills to the south. But it has a deliciously fresh, keen brilliant air, with a strong breeze tempering the sun-heat, and no risk of fever.
Indeed, nearly all this side of Matabililand is healthful, partly because it has been more thickly peopled of late years than the eastern side of the country, which was largely depopulated by the Matabili raids.
Next to the prospects of the gold-reefs (a topic to which I shall presently return), the question in which a visitor in 1895 felt most interest was the condition of the natives. It seemed too much to expect that a proud and warlike race of savages should suddenly, within less than two years from the overthrow of their king, have abandoned all notion of resistance to the whites and settled down as peaceable subjects. The whites were a mere handful scattered over an immense area of country, and the white police force did not exceed four or five hundred men. Nevertheless, the authorities of the British South Africa Company were of opinion that peace had been finally secured, and that no danger remained from the natives. They observed that, while the true Matabili who remained in the country--for some had fled down to or across the Zambesi after the defeats of 1893--were comparatively few in number, the other natives, mostly Makalakas,[47] were timid and unwarlike. They held that when a native tribe has been once completely overcome in fight, it accepts the inevitable with submission. And they dwelt on the fact that Lo Bengula"s tyranny had been a constant source of terror to his own subjects. After his flight some of his leading indunas came to Dr. Jameson and said, "Now we can sleep." This confidence was shared by all the Europeans in the country. English settlers dwelt alone without a shade of apprehension in farms, six, eight, or ten miles from another European. In the journey I am describing from Mafeking to Fort Salisbury, over eight hundred miles of lonely country, my wife and I were accompanied only by my driver, a worthy Cape Dutchman named Renske, and by a native "Cape boy." None of us was armed, and no one of the friends we consulted as to our trip even suggested that I should carry so much as a revolver, or that the slightest risk was involved in taking a lady through the country. How absolutely secure the Administrator at Bulawayo felt was shown by his sending the Matabililand mounted police (those who afterwards marched into the Transvaal) to Pitsani, in southern Bechua.n.a.land, in November, leaving the country denuded of any force to keep order.
It is easy to be wise after the event. The confidence of the Europeans in the submissiveness of the natives is now seen to have been ill founded. Causes of discontent were rife among them, which, at first obscure, became subsequently clear. Two of these causes were already known at the time of my visit, though their seriousness was under-estimated. In Mashonaland the natives disliked the tax of ten shillings for each hut, which there, as in the Transvaal Republic,[48]
they have been required to pay; and they complained that it was apt to fall heavily on the industrious Kafir, because the idle one escaped, having nothing that could be taken in payment of it. This tax was sometimes levied in kind, sometimes in labour, but by preference in money when the hut-owner had any money, for the Company desired to induce the natives to earn wages. If he had not, an ox was usually taken in pledge. In Matabililand many natives, I was told, felt aggrieved that the Company had claimed the ownership of and the right to take to itself all the cattle, as having been (in the Company"s view) the property of Lo Bengula, although many of these had, in fact, been left in the hands of the indunas, and a large part were, in December, 1895, distributed among the natives as their own property. Subsequent inquiries have shown that this grievance was deeply and widely felt. As regards the land, there was evidently the material out of which a grievance might grow, but the grievance did not seem to have yet actually arisen. The land was being sold off in farms, and natives squatting on a piece of land so sold might be required by the purchaser to clear out. However, pains were taken, I was told, to avoid including native villages in any farm sold. Often it would not be for the purchaser"s interest to eject the natives, because he might get labourers among them, and labour is what is most wanted. Two native reservations had been laid out, but the policy of the Company was to keep the natives scattered about among the whites rather than ma.s.s them in the reservations. Under Lo Bengula there had been no such thing as private ownership of land. The land was "nationalized," and no individual Kafir was deemed to have any permanent and exclusive right even to the piece of it which he might be at the time cultivating. While he actually did cultivate he was not disturbed, for the simple reason that there was far more land than the people could or would cultivate. The natives, although they till the soil, are still half-nomads. They often shift their villages, and even when the village remains they seldom cultivate the same patch for long together. Though Europeans had been freely buying the land, they bought largely to hold for a rise and sell again, and comparatively few of the farms bought had been actually stocked with cattle, while, of course, the parts under tillage were a mere trifle. Hence there did not seem to have been as yet any pressure upon the natives, who, though they vastly outnumber the Europeans, are very few in proportion to the size of the country. I doubt if in the whole territory of the Company south of the Zambesi River there are 1,000,000. To these possible sources of trouble there was added one now perceived to have been still graver. Native labour was needed not only for public works, but by private persons for mining operations. As the number of Kafirs who came willingly was insufficient, the indunas were required to furnish stout young men to work; and according to Mr. Selous,[49] who was then living in the country, force was often used to bring them in. Good wages were given; but the regulations were irksome, and the native police, who were often employed to bring in the labourers, seem to have abused their powers. To the genuine Matabili, who lived only for war and plunder, and had been accustomed to despise the other tribes, work, and especially mine work, was not only distasteful, but degrading. They had never been really subdued. In 1893 they hid away most of the firearms they possessed, hoping to use them again. Now, when their discontent had increased, two events hastened an outbreak. One was the removal of the white police to Pitsani. Only forty-four were left in Matabililand to keep order. The other was the appearance of a frightful murrain among the cattle, which made it necessary for the Company to order the slaughter even of healthy animals in order to stop the progress of the contagion. The plague had come slowly down through German and Portuguese East Africa, propagated, it is said, by the wild animals, especially buffaloes. Some kinds of wild game are as liable to it as domesticated oxen are, and on the Upper Zambesi in September, 1896, so large a part of the game had died that the lions, mad with hunger, were prowling round the native kraals and making it dangerous to pa.s.s from village to village. This new and unlooked for calamity created a ferment in the minds of the natives. The slaughter of their cattle seemed to them an act of injustice. Just when they were terrified at this calamity (which, it was reported, had been sent up among them by Lo Bengula, or his ghost, from the banks of the Zambesi) and incensed at this apparent injustice, coming on the top of their previous visitation, the news of the defeat and surrender of the Company"s police force in the Transvaal spread among them. They saw the white government defenceless, and its head, Dr. Jameson, whose kindliness had impressed those who knew him personally, no longer among them. Then, under the incitements of a prophet, came the revolt.
This, however, is a digression. In October, 1895, we travelled, unarmed and unconcerned, by night as well as by day, through villages where five months later the Kafirs rose and murdered every European within reach.
So entirely unsuspected was the already simmering disaffection.
The native question which occupied Bulawayo in September, 1895, was that native-labour question which, in one form or another, is always present to South African minds. All hard labour, all rough and unskilled labour, is, and, owing to the heat of the climate as well as the scarcity of white men, must be, done by blacks; and in a new country like Matabililand the blacks, though they can sometimes be induced to till the land, are most averse to working under ground. They are only beginning to use money, and they do not want the things which money buys. The wants of a native living with his tribe and cultivating mealies or Kafir corn are confined to a kaross (skin cloak) or some pieces of cotton cloth. The prospect of leaving his tribe to go and work in a mine, in order that he may earn wages wherewith he can buy things he has no use for, does not at once appeal to him. The white men, anxious to get to work on the gold-reefs, are annoyed at what they call the stupidity and laziness of the native, and usually clamour for legislation to compel the natives to come and work, adding, of course, that regular labour would be the best thing in the world for the natives. Some go so far as to wish to compel them to work at a fixed rate of wages, sufficient to leave a good profit for the employer.
Others go even further, and as experience has shown that the native does not fear imprisonment as a penalty for leaving his work, desire the infliction of another punishment which he does fear--that is, the lash.
Such monstrous demands seem fitter for the mouths of Spaniards in the sixteenth century than for Englishmen in the nineteenth. The difficulty of getting labour is incident to a new country, and must be borne with.
In German East Africa it has been so much felt that the Administrator of that region has proposed to import Indian labour, as the sugar-planters of Natal, and as those of Trinidad and Demerara in the West Indies, have already done. But it is to some extent a transitory difficulty. The mines at Kimberley succeed in drawing plenty of native labour; so do the mines on the Wit.w.a.tersrand; so in time the mine-owners in Matabililand may hope to do also. They must, however, be prepared, until a regular afflux of labourers has been set up, to offer, as the Kimberley people do, wages far in excess of anything the Kafirs could possibly gain among their own people, in order to overcome the distaste of the native--a very natural distaste, due to centuries of indolence in a hot climate--to any hard and continuous toil. This is no great compensation to make to those whose land they have taken and whose primitive way of life they have broken up and for ever destroyed. But once the habit of coming to work for wages has been established in these northern regions,--and it need not take many years to establish it,--the mining companies will have no great difficulty in getting as much labour as they want, and will not be obliged, as they now are, to try to arrange with a chief for the despatch of some of his "boys."
Bulawayo is the point from which one starts to visit the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, the only very grand natural object which South Africa has to show. The expedition, however, is a much longer one than a glance at the map would suggest. Owing to the prevalence of the tsetse-fly in the valley of the great river, one cannot take oxen without the prospect of losing them, and must therefore travel on foot or with donkeys. The want of a waggon makes camping out much more troublesome and involves a large force of native porters. Thus elaborate preparations are needed, and though the distance, as the crow flies, from Bulawayo to the Falls is only some two hundred miles, at least six weeks are needed for the trip, a s.p.a.ce of time we could not spare.
I have described in the last chapter the route from Cape Town to the capital of Matabililand which persons coming from England would naturally take. It is not, however, by any means the shortest route to the sea, and is therefore not the route along which the bulk of the European trade is likely in future to pa.s.s. From Cape Town to Bulawayo it is fourteen hundred miles; but from Bulawayo to the port of Beira, on the Indian Ocean, it is only six hundred and fifty miles _via_ Fort Salisbury and Mtali, and will be only about five hundred if a more direct railway line should ever be laid out. I propose to take the reader back to the sea at Beira by this Fort Salisbury and Mtali route, and in following it he will learn something about Mashonaland and the mountains which divide British from Portuguese territory.
Bulawayo is distant from Fort Salisbury two hundred and eighty miles.
The journey takes by coach four days and four nights, travelling night and day, with only short halts for meals. An ox-waggon accomplishes it in about three weeks. The track runs nearly all the way along high ground, open, breezy, and healthful, because dry, but seldom picturesque. It is a land of rolling downs, the tops of which are covered with thin gra.s.s, while better pastures, and sometimes woods also, are found in the valleys of the streams and on the lower slopes of the hills. The first part of the way, from Bulawayo to the little town of Gwelo, is rather dull. One crosses the Bimbezi River, where the Matabili were finally overthrown in the war of 1893, and the Shangani[50] River, where they suffered their first defeat. The Company"s force was advancing along the high open ground to attack Bulawayo, and the native army met them on the road. Both battlefields are bare and open, and one wonders at the folly of the natives who advanced over such ground, exposed to the rifle-fire and the still more deadly Maxim guns of the invaders. Armed in large part only with a.s.sagais, they were mown down before they could even reach the front of the British line, and their splendid courage made their destruction all the more complete. Had they stuck to the rocky and woody regions they might have made the war a far longer and more troublesome business than it proved to be. No stone marks either battle-field.
From a spot between the two rivers we turned off to the south to visit the prehistoric remains at Dhlodhlo. It was an extremely lonely track, on which we did not meet a human being for some thirty miles. No house, not even a Kafir hut, was to be found, so we bivouacked in the veldt, to the lee of a clump of thorn-bushes. The earlier part of the nights is delightful at this season (October), but it is apt to get cold between 2 and 4 A.M., and as there is usually a south-east wind blowing, the shelter of a bush or a tall ant-hill is not unwelcome. Whoever enjoys travelling at all cannot but enjoy such a night alone under the stars.
One gathers sticks to make the fire, and gets to know which wood burns best. One considers how the scanty supply of water which the waggon carries may be most thriftily used for making the soup, boiling the eggs and brewing the tea. One listens (we listened in vain) for the roar of a distant lion or the still less melodious voice of the hyena. The brilliance of the stars is such that only the fatigue of the long day--for one must always start by or before sunrise to spare the animals during the sultry noon--and the difficulty of sitting down in a great, bare, flat land, where there is not a large stone and seldom even a tree, can drive one into the vehicle to sleep. The meals, consisting of tinned meat and biscuits, with eggs and sometimes a small, lean, and desiccated chicken, are very scanty and very monotonous, but the air is so dry and fresh and bracing that one seems to find meat and drink in it.
Next day we came, at the foot of the Matoppo Hills, to a solitary farm, where we found a bright young Englishman, who, with only one white companion, had established himself in this wilderness and was raising good crops on fields to which he brought water from a neighbouring streamlet. Even the devastation wrought by a flight of locusts had not dispirited him nor diminished his faith in the country. It is not the least of the pleasures of such a journey that one finds so many cheery, hearty, sanguine young fellows scattered about this country, some of them keeping or helping to keep stores, some of them, like our friend here, showing what the soil may be made to do with skill and perseverance, and how homes may be reared upon it. One is always hospitably received; one often finds in the hard-working pioneer or the youth behind the store counter a cultivated and thoughtful mind; one has, perhaps, a glimpse of an attractive personality developing itself under simple yet severe conditions, fitted to bring out the real force of a man. After half an hour"s talk you part as if you were parting with an old friend, yet knowing that the same roof is not likely ever to cover both of you again. There are, of course, rough and ill-omened explorers and settlers in South Africa, as in other new countries: but having wandered a good deal, in different countries, on the outer edge of civilization, I was struck by the large proportion of well-mannered and well-educated men whom one came across in this tropical wilderness.
From the young Englishman"s farm we turned in among the hills, following the course of the brook, and gently rising till we reached a height from which a superb view to the north unrolled itself. The country was charming, quite unlike the dull brown downs of yesterday. On each side were steep hills, sometimes rocky, sometimes covered thick with wood; between them in the valley a succession of smooth, gra.s.sy glades, each circled round by trees. It was rural scenery--scenery in which one could wish to build a cottage and dwell therein, or in which a pastoral drama might be laid. There was nothing to suggest Europe, for the rocks and, still more, the trees were thoroughly African in character, and the air even drier and keener than that of Sicily. But the landscape was one which any lover of Theocritus might have come to love; and some day, when there are large towns in Matabililand, and plenty of Englishmen living in them, the charm of these hills will be appreciated. The valley rises at last to a gra.s.sy table-land, where, on a boss of granite rock, stand the ancient walls of Dhlodhlo, which we had come to see. I have already described the ruins (see Chapter IX), which are scanty enough, and interesting, not from any beauty they possess, but because we have so few data for guessing at their purpose or the race that built them.
The country is now very solitary, and the natives fear to approach the ruins, especially at night, believing them to be haunted. Having spent some hours in examining them, we were just starting when a swarm of locusts pa.s.sed, the first we had seen. It is a strange sight, beautiful if you can forget the destruction it brings with it. The whole air, to twelve or even eighteen feet above the ground, is filled with the insects, reddish brown in body, with bright gauzy wings. When the sun"s rays catch them it is like the sea sparkling with light. When you see them against a cloud they are like the dense flakes of a driving snow-storm. You feel as if you had never before realized immensity in number. Vast crowds of men gathered at a festival, countless tree-tops rising along the slope of a forest ridge, the chimneys of London houses from the top of St. Paul"s,--all are as nothing to the myriads of insects that blot out the sun above and cover the ground beneath and fill the air whichever way one looks. The breeze carries them swiftly past, but they come on in fresh clouds, a host of which there is no end, each of them a harmless creature which you can catch and crush in your hand, but appalling in their power of collective devastation. Yet here in southern Matabililand there had been only a few swarms. We were to see later on, in the eastern mountain region, far more terrible evidences of their presence.
From Dhlodhlo we drove to the store on the Shangani River, a distance of twenty miles or more, right across the open veldt, finding our way, with the aid of a native boy, over stony hills and thick shrubs, and even here and there across marshy stream beds, in a way which astonishes the European accustomed to think that roads, or at least beaten tracks, are essential to four-wheeled vehicles. I have driven in an open cart across the central watershed of the Rocky Mountains; but the country there, rough as it is, is like a paved road compared with some parts of the veldt over which the South African guides his team. Once or twice we missed the way in the deepening twilight, and began to prepare ourselves for another night under the stars, with a nearly exhausted food-supply.
But at last, just as darkness fell, we reached a native village, and obtained (with difficulty) a native guide for the last few miles of the drive. These miles were lighted by a succession of gra.s.s-fires. Such fires are much commoner here than in the prairies of Western America, and, happily, much less dangerous, for the gra.s.s is usually short and the fire moves slowly. They are sometimes accidental, but more frequently lighted by the natives for the sake of getting a fresh growth of young gra.s.s on the part burned and thereby attracting the game.
Sometimes the cause is even slighter. The Kafirs are fond of eating the mice and other small inhabitants of the veldt, and they fire the gra.s.s to frighten these little creatures, and catch them before they can reach their holes, with the further convenience of having them ready roasted.
Thus at this season nearly half the land on these downs is charred, and every night one sees the glow of a fire somewhere in the distance. The practice strikes a stranger as a wasteful one, exhausting to the soil, and calculated to stunt the trees, because, though the gra.s.s is too short to make the fire strong enough to kill a well-grown tree, it is quite able to injure the younger ones and prevent them from ever reaching their due proportions.
The term "store," which I have just used, requires some explanation.
There are, of course, no inns in the country, except in the three or four tiny towns. Outside these, sleeping quarters are to be had only in small native huts, built round a sort of primitive "general shop" which some trader has established to supply the wants of those who live within fifty miles or who pa.s.s along the road. The hut is of clay, with a roof of thatch, which makes it cooler than the store with its roof of galvanised iron. White ants are usually at work upon the clay walls, sending down little showers of dust upon the sleeper. Each hut contains two rough wooden frames, across which there is stretched, to make a bed, a piece of coa.r.s.e linen or ticking. Very prudent people turn back the dirty rug or bit of old blanket which covers the bed, and cast a glance upon the clay floor, to see that no black _momba_ or other venomous snake is already in possession. Such night quarters may seem unattractive, but we had many a good night"s rest in them. When they are unattainable one camps out.
From the Shangani River to Gwelo the track leads again over a succession of huge, swelling ridges, separated from one another by the valleys of _spruits_, or streams, now nearly dry, but in the wet season running full and strong. The descent to the spruit, which is often a short, steep pitch and is then called a donga, needs careful driving, and the ascent up the opposite bank is for a heavy waggon a matter of great difficulty. We pa.s.sed waggons hardly advancing a step, though eight or nine span of oxen were tugging at them, and sometimes saw two three span detached from another team and attached to the one which had failed, unaided, to mount the slope. No wonder that, when the difficulty of bringing up machinery is so great, impatient mine-owners long for the railway.
The first sign that we were close upon Gwelo came from the sight of a number of white men in shirt-sleeves running across a meadow--an unusual sight in South Africa, which presently explained itself as the English inhabitants engaged in a cricket match. Nearly the whole town was either playing or looking on. It was a hot afternoon, but our energetic countrymen were not to be scared by the sun from the pursuit of the national game. They are as much Englishmen in Africa as in England, and, happily for them and for their country, there is no part of the national character that is more useful when transplanted than the fondness for active exercise. Gwelo, a cheerful little place, though it stands in a rather bleak country, with a wooded ridge a little way off to the south, interested me as a specimen of the newest kind of settlement. It is not in strictness a mining camp, for there are no reefs in the immediate neighbourhood, but a mining centre, which proposes to live as the local metropolis of a gold-bearing district, a place of supply and seat of local administration. In October, 1895, it had about fifteen houses inhabited by Europeans and perhaps thirty houses altogether; but the materials for building other houses were already on the ground, and the usual symptoms of a "boom" were discernible. Comparing it with the many similar "new cities" I had seen in Western America, I was much struck with the absence of the most conspicuous features of those cities--the "saloons" and "bars." In California or Montana these establishments, in which the twin deities of gambling and drinking are worshipped with equal devotion, form half the houses of a recent settlement in a mining region. In South Africa, except at and near Johannesburg, one scarcely sees them. Drinking rarely obtrudes itself. What gambling there may be I know not, but at any rate there are no gambling-saloons. Nothing can be more decorous than the aspect of these new African towns, and the conduct of the inhabitants seldom belies the aspect. There is, of course, a free use of alcohol. But there is no shooting, such as goes on in American mining towns: crimes of violence of any kind are extremely rare; and the tracks are safe. No one dreams of taking the precautions against "road-agents" (_i.e._ highwaymen) which are still far from superfluous in the Western States and were far from superfluous in Australia. Trains are not stopped and robbed; coaches are not "held up."
Nothing surprised me more, next to the apparent submissiveness of the native Kafirs, than the order which appeared to prevail among the whites. A little reflection shows that in this northerly part of the country, where travelling is either very slow or very costly and difficult, malefactors would have few chances of escape. But I do not think this is the chief cause of the orderly and law-abiding habits of the people. There have never been any traditions of violence, still less of crime, in South Africa, except as against the natives. The Dutch Boers were steady, solid people, little given to thieving or to killing one another. The English have carried with them their respect for law and authority. In some respects their ethical standard is not that of the mother country. But towards one another and towards those set in authority over them, their att.i.tude is generally correct.
The night we spent at Gwelo gave a curious instance of the variability of this climate. The evening had been warm, but about midnight the S.E.
wind rose, bringing a thin drizzle of rain, and next morning the cold was that of Boston or Edinburgh in a bitter north-easter. Having fortunately brought warm cloaks and overcoats, we put on all we had and fastened the canvas curtains round the vehicle. Nevertheless, we shivered all day long, the low thick clouds raining at intervals, and the malign blast chilling one"s bones. Gwelo, of course, declared that such weather was quite exceptional; but those can have travelled little indeed who have not remarked how often they encounter "exceptional weather," and Gwelo, having existed for eighteen months only, had at best a small experience to fall back upon. The moral for travellers is: "Do not forget to take your furs and your ulsters to tropical South Africa."
Some forty miles beyond Gwelo there is a mountain called Iron Mine Hill, where the Mashonas have for generations been wont to find and work iron.
All or nearly all the Kafir tribes do this, but the Mashonas are more skilful at it than were their conquerors the Matabili. Here a track turns off to the south-east to Fort Victoria, the first military post established by the Company in its territories, and for a time the most important. It has fallen into the background lately, partly because the gold-reefs have not realized the hopes once formed of them, partly because it suffers from fever after the rains. I went to it because from it one visits the famous ruins at Zimbabwye, the most curious relic of prehistoric antiquity yet discovered in tropical Africa. The journey, one hundred miles from Iron Mine Hill to Victoria, is not an easy one, for there are no stores on the way where either provisions or night-quarters can be had, and the track is a bad one, being very little used. The country is well wooded and often pretty, with fantastic, rocky hills rising here and there, but presenting few striking features. Two views, however, dwell in my recollection as characteristic of South Africa. We had slept in a rude hut on the banks of the Shashi River, immediately beneath a rocky kopje, and rose next morning before dawn to continue the journey. Huge rocks piled wildly upon one another towered above the little meadow--rocks covered with lichens of brilliant hues, red, green, and yellow, and glowing under the rays of the level sun.
Glossy-leaved bushes nestled in the crevices and covered the mouths of the dens to which the leopards had retired from their nocturnal prowls.
One tree stood out against the clear blue on the top of the highest rock. Cliff-swallows darted and twittered about the hollows, while high overhead, in the still morning air, two pairs of large hawks sailed in wide circles round and round the summit of the hill. A few miles farther the track crossed a height from which one could gaze for thirty miles in every direction over a gently rolling country covered with wood, but with broad stretches of pasture interposed, whose gra.s.s, bleached to a light yellow, made one think it a ma.s.s of cornfields whitening to harvest. Out of these woods and fields rose at intervals what seemed the towers and spires of cities set upon hills. We could have fancied ourselves in central Italy, surveying from some eminence like Monte Amiata the ancient towns of Tuscany and Umbria rising on their rocky heights out of chestnut woods and fields of ripening corn. But the city towers were only piles of grey rock, and over the wide horizon there was not a sign of human life--only the silence and loneliness of an untouched wilderness.
From Fort Victoria, where the war of 1893 began by a raid of the young Matabili warriors upon the Mashona tribes, who were living under the protection of the Company, it is seventeen miles to Zimbabwye. The track leads through a pretty country, with alternate stretches of wood and gra.s.s, bold hills on either side, and blue peaked mountains in the distance. Crossing a low, bare ridge of granite, one sees nearly a mile away, among thick trees, a piece of grey wall, and when one comes nearer, what seems the top of a tower just peeping over the edge of the wall. It is Zimbabwye--a wall of loose but well trimmed and neatly fitted pieces of granite surrounding an elliptical inclosure; within this inclosure other half-ruined walls over-grown by shrubs and trees, and a strange solid tower or pillar thirty feet high, built, without mortar, of similar pieces of trimmed granite.[51] This is all that there is to see. One paces to and fro within the inclosure and measures the width and length of the pa.s.sages between the walls. One climbs the great inclosing wall at a point where part of it has been broken down, and walks along the broad top, picking one"s way over the stems of climbing shrubs, which thrust themselves across the wall from beneath or grow rooted in its crevices. One looks and looks again, and wonders. But there is nothing to show whether this grey wall is three centuries or thirty centuries old. There is no architectural style, no decoration even, except a rudely simple pattern on the outside of the wall which faces the east; so there is nothing by which one can connect this temple, if it is a temple, with the buildings of any known race or country. In this mystery lies the charm of the spot--in this and in the remoteness and silence of a country which seems to have been always as it is to-day. One mark of modern man, and one only, is to be seen. In the middle of the valley, some three hundred yards from the great building, Mr. Cecil Rhodes has erected a monument to Major Wilson and the thirty-seven troopers who fell with him on the Lower Shangani River in December, 1893, fighting gallantly to the last against an overwhelming force of Matabili. The monument stands on an eminence surrounded by the broken wall of some ancient stronghold. It has been wisely placed far enough from the great ruin not to form an incongruous element in the view of the latter, and it was an imaginative thought to commemorate, at a spot in this new land which bears witness to a race of prehistoric conquerors, the most striking incident in the history of the latest conquest.
We climbed the rocky height, where the skilfully constructed walls of the ancient fort show that those who built Zimbabwye lived in fear of enemies. We sat beside the spring, a clear though not copious spring, which rises a little to the south of the great building from a fissure in the rock. Fountains so clear are rare in this country, and the existence of this one probably determined the site of the great building itself. It flows into a small pool, and is then lost, being too small to form a rivulet. No trace of man"s hand is seen round it or on the margin of the pool, but those who worshipped in the temple of Zimbabwye doubtless worshipped this fountain also, for that is one of the oldest and most widely diffused forms of worship in the world. Restless nature will some day overthrow the walls of the temple, which she is piercing with the roots of shrubs and entwining with the shoots of climbing wild vines, and then only the fountain will be left.
From Fort Victoria to Fort Salisbury it is nearly two hundred miles, the country generally level, though studded, like parts of southern India, with isolated rocky hills, whose crags of granite or gneiss break under the sun and rain into strange and fantastic shapes. A people sufficiently advanced to erect fortifications might have made for themselves impregnable strongholds out of the tops of these kopjes. The timid Makalakas have in many places planted their huts in the midst of the huge detached ma.s.ses into which the kopjes are cleft; but they have not known how to make their villages defensible, and have been content with piling up a few loose stones to close some narrow pa.s.sage between the rocks, or surrounding their huts with a rough fence of thorn-bushes.
We found one deserted village where upon each loose block there had been placed a rude erection of clay, covered at the top, and apparently intended for the storing of grain. Thus raised from the ground it was safer from wild beasts and from rain. All the dwelling huts but two had been burned. We entered these, and found the walls covered with the rudest possible representations of men and animals, drawn with charcoal, more coa.r.s.ely than an average child of ten would draw, and far inferior in spirit to the figures which the Lapps of Norway will draw on a reindeer horn spoon, or the Red Indians of Dakota upon a calico cloak.
Whether the village had perished by an accidental fire, or whether its inhabitants, relieved from that terror of the Matabili which drove them to hide amongst the rocks, had abandoned it for some spot in the plain below, there was no one to tell us. One curious trace of insecurity remained in a dry and light tree-trunk, which had been left standing against the side of a flat-topped rock some thirty feet high, with the lowest dozen feet too steep to be climbed. It had evidently served as a sort of ladder. By it the upper part of the rock might be gained, and when it had been pulled up, approach was cut off and the fugitives on the flat top might be safe, while the Matabili were plundering their stores of grain and killing their friends beneath.