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 blackc.o.c.k, 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 pa.s.sed 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 Sh.e.l.ley"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 a.s.sisted 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 princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al 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 n.o.ble 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 unhara.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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 sh.e.l.led 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 sh.e.l.ls were fired into that little place than into Mafeking, and the courage of the few by the river who pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sages. All around were n.o.ble 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 cla.s.sics, 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 hoa.r.s.ely 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage. Farther east, and at a higher alt.i.tude, 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 Wit.w.a.tersberg 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s; 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 pa.s.s. High walls of naked rock rose on either hand, and at last, after some hard walking, we saw a s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed before those pa.s.sionless eyes, as their successors will pa.s.s and be forgotten. And in the sense of man"s littleness there is comfort, for it is part of the t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.ble line of crags running out like a b.u.t.tress 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 c.u.mberland fells, and not on the edge of the tropics and 300 miles from the sea. We a.s.sisted 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 gra.s.sed 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 b.u.t.tercups 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 cla.s.sics. By-and-by we descended on the little township of Haenertsburg, a cl.u.s.ter 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 gra.s.ses.
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 gra.s.s 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 quant.i.ties of maidenhair fern and the graceful asparagus creeper. But soon I noticed little beyond the exceeding toilsomeness of the pa.s.sage. 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 quant.i.ties 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 a.s.suredly be d.a.m.ned," said the predikant, "and burn in h.e.l.l." "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 gra.s.s 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.